Under the title 'Júlia Ventura - 1975-1983', curated by Bruno Marchand, the exhibition runs through the initial period of the artist's production, when the objectives and conceptual nature of her work were defined, according to information from Culturgest.

"Júlia Ventura's work constitutes one of the most powerful reflections that the national artistic context has produced on the issues of identity and on the role that the contemporary image plays in them", adds the curator about an exhibition itinerary that the artist has been developing since the early 1980s, inside and outside Portugal.

Throughout seven rooms, Culturgest presents the photographic and video works that came to "confirm a critical and programmatic consistency that made no concessions whatsoever in terms of its objectives and its conceptual nature", stressed Bruno Marchand, Culturgest's visual arts programmer.

These are works that "address various declensions of self-representation, where her own photographed image serves as the basis for reasoning and a conceptualisation about feminine representation, simultaneously as a model and author", which, from the 1980s onwards, saw her work experience a "significant circulation" in galleries and national and international institutions.

Among her countless exhibitions are participations in group exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam (1991), at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, in Madrid (1997), Museo Extremeno e Ibero-americano de Arte Contemporânea, in Badajoz (2001), and solo exhibitions at Villa Arson, in Nice (1989), at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Genève (2002) and at the Centro Cultural de Belém (1997).

In 2004, an anthology of her work was held at the Fundação de Serralves, in Porto, and at the Muller Museum, in Otterlo, in the Netherlands.

Júlia Ventura, who has lived between Lisbon and Amsterdam since the mid-1980s, graduated in painting from the Escola Superior de Belas Artes de Lisboa and has a degree in Video Art from Concordia University, in Canada.

"It was necessary to show the initial phase of her career, to delve into the origins of a work that, from the outset, claimed for itself a critical, discursive and aesthetic territory that was dedicated to gradually dismantling the role that the image and its multiple instrumentalisations played, and still play, in the standardisation of behaviours and in the construction of the heteronormative and binary identity building to which we are, to a large extent, relegated", also commented Bruno Marchand about the opportunity of this exhibition.

Júlia Ventura's images, in colour and black and white, provoke reflection on prejudices, clichés, preconceived ideas and stereotypes about what a man is, what a woman is and "lays bare the difficulty we have in seeing through and beyond these conventions and platitudes", said the curator.

Throughout the exhibition period, Culturgest will hold two guided tours with the artist: one with Júlia Ventura and curator Pedro Lapa, on 1 June, at 4 pm, and the second with the artist and Vanda Gorjão, on 28 September, at 4 pm.

Other guided tours of the exhibition are also planned, always on Saturdays, at 4 pm, on 25 May, 29 June and 20 July, according to the organisation.

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