Lisbon-based artist Sara Bichão (PT, 1986) is presenting a new exhibition at the Serralves Museum's Contemporary Gallery. Entitled Lightless (When there is no light), the show brings together a group of works produced during a series of residencies over more than a year. With the support of the museum and park staff, Bichão transformed a small room located on the Serralves Foundation farm into a studio. In this space, the artist adapted to the unique environment of the museum and the seasonal changes that profoundly mark our daily lives and our relationship with the surrounding nature. Like many of her projects, the artist has embraced unpredictability, drawing inspiration and letting herself be guided by the experience of the place and its resources.

Starting from a philosophy of reuse and recycling, using various materials left over from the exhibitions organised by the museum, but also others found in nature - such as the gravel that served as raw material for a set of sculptures and the pink paint from the iconic Casa de Serralves, used in various drawings on cardboard, just to name a few examples - Sara Bichão casts a critical eye on contemporary artistic production that sees art as a commercial commodity, and therefore contributes to an endless cycle of consumption and waste. In her work, she claims art as an act of resistance, a tool for challenging established norms and promoting a collective awareness of the importance of sustainability and respect for the environment. However, more than a political manifestation, Sara Bichão's work is an emotional and empirical expression, an invitation to explore new perspectives and ways of looking at the world and relating to nature and others. Here you can feel the artist's hand; the delicacy of the gestures that moulded the sculptures and sewed the fabrics; the intuition and freedom of a practice that affirms her as an absolutely unique voice in the national context. In this interweaving of art and substance, the artist reveals the poetry of the eternal cycle, like a wheel of life, where each work absorbs the essence of what was, transforming itself into what will be, in a constant and uninterrupted flow that echoes the intrinsic rhythm of nature.

In the exhibition at Serralves, we become part of an almost immersive environment, populated by a series of indecipherable presences: bodies huddled on the floor, faces watching us in the dim light, a suspended cocoon that seems to imprison its own history, blue LED lights that form a meandering design suspended from the ceiling as if they were leading us somewhere without taking us anywhere. Perhaps this is one of the many questions that might spring to mind when you enter Sara Bichão's exhibition - Where does it take us? What does it tell us? The beauty of her work is often exactly that: the fact that it doesn't offer definitive, dogmatic answers. It doesn't have to (and it shouldn't).

Lightless suggests a journey along the less enlightened paths of art and life. This title, shrouded in poetry and mystery, leads us to reflect on the brevity and fragility of human existence, but also on the transience of objects, materials and nature itself; on the moments of uncertainty and ambiguity, the spaces where silence and the invisible assert themselves. Could this place, a kind of limbo of scattered memories and reminiscences, where time has stagnated in an eternal night, lead us to a more intimate reflection that ultimately encourages us to explore our own inner abysses? After all, both light and darkness are essential and reveal their charm and meaning most intensely in the expression of their limits and potential or, radically, in their absence.

The exhibition is organised by the Serralves Foundation - Museum of Contemporary Art, and is curated by Inês Grosso, chief curator of the Serralves Museum, and produced by Giovana Enham.