“It feels a bit of a gamble,” said Suzanne Cotter of her vision for the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, where she arrived from working on the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi project from New York just over a year and a half ago, succeeding outgoing director Joao Fernandes. As such, her program is just now beginning to bear fruit, but the harvest so far has been sweet, including critically lauded presentations of the Swiss-Brazilian artist Mira Schendel (the first in Portugal), a show demonstrating the symbiotic relationship between art and architecture, and “12 Contemporaries: Present States,” an exhibition of a dozen young Portuguese artists.
Cotter has had the advantage of a canvas that is a work of art in its own right, a jewel of a museum lined in marble and granite completed in 1999 by Pritzker Prize-winner Alvaro Siza. The museum forms a part of the Serralves Foundation, established in the long wake of the country’s 1974 democratic revolution to incubate contemporary artistic production in Portugal. The museum itself has always had international ambitions, however, and attracts some 450,000 visitors annually to the city caught between the Atlantic and the Douro Valley. Artists, too, are coming at Cotter’s invitation; Theaster Gates recently completed a residency with his Black Monks of Mississippi musical troupe.
The Monks’ soulful sounds wafted through the hallways of the coolly opulent Art Deco-era Serralves Villa as guests were welcomed last weekend to fete the foundation’s 25th anniversary and the museum’s 15th. The event marked the end of the summer-long show “Histories: Works from the Serralves Collection,” and Cotter sat down to speak to ARTINFO about her plans for the museum.
What have you done so far that you’re most proud of, or that sets the tone for how you’d like to proceed in the future?
I don’t like to talk about pride too much because I’m always a bit worried about that. But what I’m happy about is that my idea of the way the program can unfold and function is actually having some impact on our audiences locally, nationally, and internationally.
I think the key strategic areas for me as far as an artistic vision are about highlighting the collection, making sure it’s visible. We have a big show on the collection on view now that also includes recent work, to try to give a new, fresh perspective of what the collection might be, offer some narratives that I think are interesting and relevant with respect to art in Portugal, but also broadly.
Can you be a little more specific about some of those themes?
Well, the large theme is narrative histories, but my sense is that when people think of contemporary art here and particularly in relation to Serralves, they think it’s about abstraction and conceptual art. That’s something that was part of the manifesto when this museum opened. We have a lot of work here that, although it may be conceptually driven to some degree, has stories to tell. And those stories may be fictional but most of them have some relationship to reality in some way. And then the other aspect is that we’ve begun to think, with the people at the museum and then with our publics, about how those narratives extend more globally. You know, Portugal has always been part of a broader conversation in the world. So how might we begin to reflect on that, or reflect that a bit more through the presentation of the collection?
Who are some of the artists that you’ve recently acquired in this context?
In the current presentation of works from the collection, we have new contributions by Amalia Pica, Liam Gillick, Haegue Yang, Charlotte Posenenske, Walid Raad, the Akram Zatari installation that we showed last year in Venice, and paintings by Tala Madani, Paulina Olowska, and Lucy McKenzie. We also have a major installation of work by Leonor Antunes, a Portuguese artist living between Lisbon and Berlin, paired with pieces by Danh Vo. It’s not that many works, but it does show the direction that we’re trying to go in. What I’m happy about is that people have been very responsive.
So you don’t feel isolated by being in Porto, off the usual art circuit?
Oh no. Especially after having the experience of living in New York, where you feel you are the center of one world, but you’re actually far away from other worlds. Here I feel I am back in the European conversation that I’ve been part of for more than 25 years. My community doesn’t feel so far away and Portugal is a pleasurable place to come. But the positive response has also come from the community here. It’s important that the artistic community here in Portugal feel that what’s happening at Serralves is meaningful for them. Symbolically it’s an incredibly important institution, because of its history, but it is also important in reality.
When we announced the program late last year to the press here, one of the first questions was, “So there’s no big names?” I was kind of prepared for that, but it does send a kind of doubt into your mind. But the Mira Schendel show that we presented here with the Tate and the Pinakotheke Sao Paulo was an absolute revelation. People were writing me letters thanking me for putting the show on. This spring we did “12: Contemporaries: Present States,” a show of young Portuguese artists show that generated a lot of response.
In terms of the art scene in Portugal, my impression is that people decry the lack of state support for the arts here, on account of the financial crisis, but the scene in Lisbon strikes me as a scrappy, DIY community that stuck by its members. I was thinking it could be the new “New York in the 1970s” moment. Would you agree?
Could be! I was actually thinking of London in the early 1990s — before Tate Modern and Frieze, Charles Saatchi hadn’t begun collecting YBAs yet, and it was still a conservative government. Here the critical mass is smaller, simply because it’s a smaller population, but I think there are some really interesting artists here, very cosmopolitan, who move around a lot. There’s a lot of smart artists, and they’re collected and cared for here. I think what’s lacking — and this is where Serralves comes in — is a platform for them to be seen in relation to what’s going on elsewhere, because it’s a different kind of value system. It’s like, your mother thinks you’re the most beautiful person in the world, but what about your neighbor, or the man across the street?
There’s no doubt that a healthy art market is a reflection of a healthy art scene and artistic community. My sense is that collectors are very loyal and supportive of artists here, but there are only so many venues. The others are more dependent on state support than we are.
How has your work with Abu Dhabi impacted what you’re doing here?
Many of the questions remain the same. My job before that one was chief curator of Modern Art Oxford, out of the metropolitan center. There are similar questions about constituency and the artistic community. Like what language do we speak and what language do they speak, and can we find a common vocabulary. And then there’s the question of context. If you’re a visitor who comes to Serralves, what do you want to see? You want to learn something, not see what you can see in any other capital city. In Abu Dhabi as well, we tried to generate a sense of ownership and relevance for people in that part of the world, but at the same time speak to a broader context. It’s exactly the equivalent here in Porto.
What’s next?
After a show of Iranian contemporary artist Monir Farmanfarmaian, which will travel to the Guggenheim in New York, next year in the autumn we’re organizing a major retrospective of the Portuguese artist Helena Almeida, who’s begun to garner an amount of interest institutionally. That exhibition will travel to Paris, Brussels, and Sao Paulo. We have a great history of collaborating with other curators and institutions, but this really represents a new moment in the history of the museum where we are initiating and sending out shows. Sometimes change is not only about just the things you can see; it’s about the dynamics of what comes in and what goes out.
