7/28/2019 Ensino Medico, exhibition at Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 1999

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1911-1999 O ensino mdico em Lisboa no incio do sculo: Sete artistas

contemporneos evocam a gerao mdica de 1911/ Medical teaching in Lisbon in

the early 20th century: seven contemporary artists evoke the generation of 1911.

Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa.

Manuel Valente Alves is an artist and a doctor. Committed to interdisciplinarity, he has

made something of a vocation of bringing together these two disparate areas of

endeavour and research. His starting point for this exhibition is the notion that post-

modernity is characterised by the dissolution of boundaries between the discreet areas

of study outlined during the Enlightenment, Valente Alves has fervently fostered

dialogue between the disciplines of art and medicine, in ways that offer a synthesis of

the two disciplines, without either of them losing its particular identity. TheAllegorical Impulse the series of debates that he earlier organised for the Order of

Doctors, brought together theoreticians and practitioners from both of these areas. The

launch of the present exhibition was timed to accompany the opening of the 9 th

National Congress of Medical Education at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in

Lisbon.

Rather than opting for the standard documentary exhibition, Valente Alves invited

seven contemporary artists to produce original works of art inspired by the lives andworks of seven doctors around 1911 (catalogue). While medicine in Portugal was

mostly academic prior to 1911, Valente Alves tells us with the founding of the School of

Medicine in Lisbon in 1911, an era of medical research was inaugurated, its outcomes

keeping apace with those of advanced centres such as London, Paris and Berlin. From

this period, seven doctors were selected and each allocated to a single artist; seven

writers were invited to produce texts accompanying the work of each artist, in a

handsome and highly informative publication that also includes twenty six texts by

some of the most important figures from the Faculty of Medicine in Lisbon.

This is an ambitious enterprise. While often, works produced to a particular

iconographic brief tend towards the programmatic or illustrative, the result here is, for

the most part, surprisingly tangential. The artists, who represent several generations

(dates of birth range from 1934 to 1972) as well as practices, all responded to the

challenge energetically with detailed research, fashioning the particularities of each of

the medical personalities in accordance with a their own artistic trajectory and body of

work: no easy task.

7/28/2019 Ensino Medico, exhibition at Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 1999

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Several of the artists deal with the notion of the body as an articulated whole, exploring

the interplay between interior and exterior, metaphorically, between body and world

(Helena Almeida, Jos Pedro Croft, Miguel Palma, No Sendas). Cristina Mateus

focuses on the fact that her doctor (Slvio Rebello) was also a poet. ngela Ferreiras

work is centred around the research of Anbal Bettencourt, a pioneer in the study ofbilharzia, a parasitic disease transmissible in water. Bettencourt was also one of the

people responsible for the founding of the Portuguese Photographic Association.

Deploying the rigorous conceptual strategies that have come to characterise her work

in recent years, Ferreira splices together photographic images taken by the doctor

women laundering clothes in river water with images from Chianca de Garcias

celebrated film A Aldeia da Roupa Branca (village of white linen), made in 1939. In the

film, the image of the regime is, quite literally, cleaned up: it bolstered the Salazarist

myth of a robust, pure and rural nationhood, represented by spanking clean laundry.

Helena Almeidas noteworthy series of photographs titled Dentro de Mim (inside me)

shows her own body in various prone positions, in an architectural space scraped and

expunged of anything extraneous. Jos Predro Crofts untitled sculpture is among the

artists best work ever. A structure made of metal and mirrors, the piece boasts the

clean lines and pared down aspect of minimalist sculpture. However, the repeated

presence of reflective surfaces draws the spectator into a game of surfaces in which

interior and exterior represent each other, a succinct metaphor for the human bodyitself.

Ruth Rosengarten

1911-1999 O ensino mdico em Lisboa no incio do sculo: Sete artistas

contemporneos evocam a gerao mdica de 1911/ Medical teaching in Lisbon in

the early 20th century: seven contemporary artists evoke the generation of 1911.

Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa.

Published in Viso, 25 February, 1999.