Rita Sobral Campos (PT/US), born in Lisbon in 1982, lives and works in New York. Solo and group exhibitions include: Une communauté imaginée, Frac des Pays de la Loire, Nantes (2022), O Trágico Destino Vertical, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon (2020); short-shorts, with August Sander, Galerie Andreas Huber, Vienna (2015); Tournament d’Objet, Charlottenborg Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2013); Sunday Sessions, MoMA-PS1, New York (2012); When your Lips are my Ears, our Bodies become Radios, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2010); Anabasis: On Rituals of Homecoming, Ludwik Grohman Villa, Lodz (2009); UNCLEHEAD with Alexandre Singh, EDP Foundation, Lisbon (2008), and Structural Schizophrenia ou quando a mentira se tornou verdade, Culturgest, Porto (2005). Sobral Campos is a co-founder of Sputnik & Fizzle, a publisher nonprofit devoted to lectures, poetry, and other interventions in the world of ideas and praxis; recent titles include works by Fred Moten, Divya Victor, Ed Steck, Zhou Sivan, and Aditi Machado, among others.
Sobral Campos devises ways to deliver texts and literary accounts in formats alternative to that of the traditional novel. As such, her projects tend to evolve and materialize according to the demands of her texts, which could be film, works on paper, sculpture, printed matter, and the occasional performance piece. She seeks to reveal, (playfully) mock, and disrupt that which is taken as self-evident. By deploying the tradition of absurdist writing and embracing anachronistic forms, her characters are able to subvert conventional wisdom. They interrogate social norms, group ethics, and unexamined prejudices, and in doing so they open up potential deviant plots, illogical reversals, and farcical misadventures. These stories challenge hierarchies, complicate gender, confuse borders, and confound the laws of nature.
Rita Sobral Campos 