Dublin, Ireland - The first solo exhibition in Ireland by the Portuguese artist João Penalva is at the Irish Museum of Modern Art until 27 August, 2006.  João Penalva presents a selection of installations and videos created over the past decade.  Many of the works involve superimposing objects with fragmentary narratives, reflecting the supreme importance of language as a medium in Penalva’s varied and meticulously-crafted body of work.  The complex webs of meanings which he creates are used to explore the way in which culture is categorized and presented, largely through a process-based approach employing collection, detection, translation and documentation.

Comprising some 30 works, João Penalva ranges from Wallenda, 1997-98, depicting the artist’s heroic feat of whistling the complete score for Stravinsky’s monumental Rite of Spring, to the much gentler Kitsune, 2001, with its delicate imagery of pine trees in a foggy landscape accompanied by a reflective, hypnotic narrative.  Penalva started his career as a dancer, and the gestures associated with performance retain their importance in his work.  In an interview in the exhibition catalogue, he explains that his “language is, and always has been, a theatrical one”.  In his 1999 film Mister, set in an old caravan, a shoe takes to the stage to discourse – in declamatory tones and with Beckett-like absurdity – on illness, faith, medicine and death, including quotations from that last refuge of the afflicted, The Book of Job.

Well known for his hour-long films spoken in less-frequently-heard languages, such as Japanese, Hungarian and Esperanto, Penalva revels in the twists and turns of writing in English, having the text spoken in another language, and then reintroducing the original English version as subtitles, all part of his constant “fictionalization of reality”.  When told that Kitsune, which had been filmed in Madeira, looked Japanese, he replied: “If it looks like Kurosawa, it does so because you hear the language of a Kurosawa film.  If I were to use the same image with Swedish actors, Bergman would be your cultural reference and you would immediately identify it as unmistakably Swedish.”