Consultório is a multidisciplinary art space located in Chamusca, a small town in the countryside of Ribatejo, Portugal. The gallery brings together art, sound, art history, orthopedics, and more, and aims to be a humanistic spokesperson for the town, aiming to extend the concept of art to the local community by presenting performances and contemporary artistic practices.
The current exhibition, THE ESTRANGEMENT SET by Liliya Lifanova and Lucas Samaras, provides a perfect glimpse of Consultório as a space and as a cultural mission.
The work is introduced by Addenda II, an excerpt from Samara Dickman’s short story (1961-62), which is placed at the entrance to the exhibition, precisely to lead the viewer by the hand into this austere, alien condition that the work proposes.
The ultimate goal of Lifanova’s exhibition is precisely to create an alienating, angular, and foreign universe, and she does so by occupying the entire gallery with a sloped platform populated by disparate sculptural elements, creating “a constellation of conditions of alienation: a deliberately dissonant environment, a suspension of the ordinary, designed to displace the viewer from habitual perception.”
Starting from here, we can see similarities with Lucas Samaras’s #room1. With this work, Samaras reorganized his New Jersey studio as both the setting and the material for his works. However, while #room1 presents space as something immediate and present, Lifanova’s ESTRANGEMENT SET attempts to focus more on the distance that a formalized and dislocated interiority brings, translating these sensations into polished objects, reduced to the essential. Nestled within this alienating universe are Samaras’s “Photo Transformations,” altered Polaroid self-portraits intended to complement the restless tone of the entire composition.
With THE ESTRANGEMENT SET, Consultório offers us a vision of the archive not as a static repository, but as a dynamic place where the self experiences itself, sometimes distant and detached, sometimes close and present.
