Every city develops its own rhythm during art week. In Lisbon, unlike Basel or Frieze, the fair itself rarely functions as the sole centre of gravity. Instead, ARCO Lisboa unfolds through a dispersed geography of museums, galleries, artist-run spaces and temporary encounters, creating a city-wide choreography where historical memory, political urgency and speculative imagination coexist.
What emerged throughout the week was a remarkable consistency of concerns: artists and curators repeatedly returned to questions of memory, systems of violence, collective histories and the unstable territories between visibility and disappearance.
At the Albuquerque Foundation, Grada Kilomba‘s The Bottom of the Earth transformed geological history into political archaeology. Conceived as a “scenography of the future”, the exhibition positioned the ocean floor as an archive of colonial violence, migration, war and ecological catastrophe. Through monumental installations, textile environments and film, Kilomba proposed memory not as preservation, but as a continuously active and embodied force.
Grada Kilomba at Albuquerque Foundation
Brazilian artist Rodrigo Cass took over Brotéria and approached transcendence through geometry. Drawing equally from Byzantine iconography, conceptual art and cosmological thought, Cass treats form as a metaphysical structure capable of mediating between the visible and invisible worlds. In his work, the sacred survives secularisation not as belief, but as a formal and perceptual condition.
Questions of cognition and interpretation surfaced in Músculo Mental, curated by Verónica de Mello, where João Louro and Dagoberto Rodríguez transformed critical thinking itself into artistic material. Louro’s Blind Images deny direct visual access, forcing acts of reconstruction and interpretation, while Rodríguez’s practice positions art as an ongoing intellectual exercise, a symbolic gymnasium in which ideas are continuously tested and destabilised.
At Galeria Municipal da Boavista, Inês Mendes Leal‘s Reaching for fata morgana occupied the unstable territory between scientific observation and poetic experience. Developed through research in Chile’s Atacama Desert, the exhibition translated optical phenomena into immersive environments of sound, heat and perception, where mirages became metaphors for the fragility of human knowledge itself.
Inês Mendes Leal at Galeria Boavista
At Zé dos Bois, Alexandre Estrela’s RedSkyFalls (Réplica) expanded the logic of Portugal’s Venice Biennale pavilion into a distributed, speculative ecology. Fruit flies, behavioural data, seismic activity and corporate logotypes merged into an unsettling system where planetary forces, animal behaviour and human systems of communication appeared equally unstable and interconnected.
Alexandre Estrela at Galeria Zé dos Bois.
The same venue also hosted a retrospective dedicated to Brazilian conceptual pioneer Paulo Bruscky, whose work since the 1970s has continuously investigated the productive collision between chance, language, communication and technology. Bruscky’s enduring interest in coincidence itself emerged as a compelling counterpoint to contemporary algorithmic systems of organisation.
Paulo Bruscky at Galeria Zé dos Bois
At Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art, João Pedro Vale and Nuno Alexandre Ferreira transformed the gallery into a constellation of sculptural bars, bathrooms and social spaces in DAWN. Drawing upon the histories of queer nightlife, performance and political resistance, the exhibition proposed pleasure itself as a form of collective infrastructure. Cocktails became sculptures, bars became stages and desire emerged as both social choreography and political strategy.
João Pedro Vale & Nuno Alexandre Ferreira at Cristina Guerra
At CAM Gulbenkian, Rosa Barba‘s curatorial project Desenhar Vocabulários treated the museum collection as a living score. Works activated and responded to one another through carefully orchestrated sequences, proposing exhibition-making itself as a form of choreography in which language, image and memory remain perpetually unfinished.
Rosa Barba at CAM Gulbenkian
At MAC/CCB, multiple eyes, curated by Núria Enguita and Rafael Barber Cortell, brought together Lubaina Himid, Ines Doujak and Patricia Domínguez in a powerful meditation on dissident forms of knowledge. Rather than simply recovering forgotten histories, the exhibition inhabits alternative epistemologies: Himid resurrects erased colonial subjects through vibrant and theatrical interventions; Doujak constructs hybrid political bestiaries where bodies, technologies and extractivist economies collapse into one another; while Domínguez proposes forms of spiritual and botanical knowledge capable of resisting the violences of late capitalism. Together, they suggest that narration itself constitutes a political act of collective care and resistance.
Lubaina Himid at MAC_CCB
Patricia Dominguez at MAC_CCB
At Kindred Spirit gallery, questions of visibility and disappearance were explored through more subtle registers. The exhibition ma_n-if——est, developed between Lisbon and Berlin, brought together Kate Newby and Noé Sendas in a meditation on memory, absence and perception. Drawing inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the exhibition approached invisibility not as lack, but as a productive condition through which memory, fiction and sensory experience become intertwined.
Kate Newby & Noé Sendas at Kindred Spirit
Meanwhile, the recently inaugurated Pavilhão Julião Sarmento established itself as one of Lisbon’s most significant new institutional spaces. Conceived around the collection and intellectual legacy of Julião Sarmento, the institution opened with Take 1, an exhibition structured around the themes of art, friendship, architecture and intimacy. Featuring works by artists including Marina Abramović, Robert Morris, Juan Muñoz, Rui Chafes, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner and John Baldessari, the exhibition proposes collection-making not as accumulation, but as an ongoing conversation between artists, ideas and forms of life.
Take 1 at Pavilhão Julião Sarmento
This dialogue continued in Depois de Para Sempre, where works by Fernando Calhau entered into posthumous conversation with sculptures by Rui Chafes, extending one of the last exhibitions presented during Calhau’s lifetime. Here, memory operated neither as nostalgia nor historical reconstruction, but as an active and unfinished process.
What became evident throughout ARCO Lisboa 2026 was that Lisbon’s contemporary art ecosystem increasingly resists singular narratives. Rather than producing certainty, these exhibitions generated spaces of friction: between history and fiction, ritual and technology, private desire and collective memory, visibility and disappearance.
In Lisbon this year, contemporary art was less interested in representation than in transformation. Less concerned with offering answers than with creating conditions under which new forms of seeing, remembering and imagining might become possible.
