Lombardi—Kargl curated by João Laia
„Threesome (magnetic fields)“

João Laia is the Artistic Director of the Contemporary Art Department of the Municipality of Porto since 2024. From 2019 to 2024, he was chief curator at Kiasma—National Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki.
With Valentinas Klimašauskas, he curated the Lithuanian National Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024) and the 14th Baltic Triennial at the CAC in Vilnius (2021). Among others, Laia curated the 12th Gothenburg Biennial (2023) and co-curated the 18th and 19th editions of Videobrasil in São Paulo (2015-17).

Threesome (magnetic fields) 

The exhibition brings together the practices of Joana da Conceição and Joana Escoval, two artists whose work explores the limits of human perception, sensory awareness and consciousness.

Conceição’s work creates a dialogue between image and sound, often taking the form of immersive installations. Built around colour, light, aural rhythms and revolving patterns, these audio-visual spaces question the idea of the eye as the main way through which reality is understood. Instead, they invite more open, holistic and sensory ways of engaging with the world.

Joana Escoval uses an expanded idea of sculpture to reflect on our relationship with the world. Her works unfold through constellation-like arrangements of elements that can resemble conductors, circuits or channels of energy. Through this approach, Escoval presents life as an interconnected web of forces and synergies. Her subtle yet powerful gestures draw attention to the often unseen forces that shape life on the planet.

Starting from an understanding of the human body as porous and connected, rather than isolated and separate, Threesome (magnetic fields) creates a relational system between two artistic positions. Together, these works form an experiential environment that invites us to explore and expand our perceptive capabilities.

Images, bodies and sounds come together to create an environment in permanent flux, like magnetic fields in a process of alchemical transformation. Sound acts as a central force, surrounding every part of the exhibition and shaping a landscape with cosmic undertones, where the micro, the macro and the pixelated merge into one another. The gravitational pull of each element creates a movement of convergence and intertwined play, inviting us to move away from fixed or stagnant ways of experiencing life.

Escoval’s antennas activate Conceição’s dreamlike landscapes and connect with the satellite-like bodies orbiting in space. At the same time, the looped qualities of the sound and its apparatus form an aural mandala that echoes the electrical vibrations of a horse’s heartbeat. In this context, introspection appears not as isolation, but as a movement of connection and expansion, similar to breathing, which depends on both inward and outward efforts.

In this transitional place, established distinctions such as self and other, interior and exterior, horizontal and vertical, abstract and figurative, or static and in motion, give way to a sensory experience of the intimate connections shared by all things. Threesome (magnetic fields) opens a space for intuitive ways of interacting with, and therefore connecting to, the world, offering an affective celebration of the living multiplicity of the universe.

João Laia