Thinking about an exhibition is thinking through a problem. Finding answers or, if answers are nowhere to be found, attempting to deal as best as possible with said problem. What has no solution is already solved, some people would say. This exhibition, yet to be titled (titles can be objects of desire just as physical objects or images are), brings together a selection of works that possess in themselves the keys for their own decoding. They are clear and articulate in the way they engage with those who stand before them. This, however, does not mean they are simple, or easy to understand. Quite the contrary. They are complex and rich with subtleties and nuances.

Located above a shopping mall in Ponta Delgada, the exhibition space constitutes the first step in terms of better understanding the problem we're faced with. A water front real-estate development from the 1970s comprising two residential towers and the shopping mall above which we are installing the exhibition. Its scale is off, too big, too tall for a city like Ponta Delgada. These developments are common throughout Portugal. Most cities have one. They embody a certain zeitgeist and signal very explicitly a specific desire, a desire that speaks of abandoning rurality in favor of city life and of consumerism as a life style. They signal an alignment with “real” modern life, or its perception, through a desire-producing device. Wanting, needing, craving. The exhibition space has been abandoned for years, after having been a gym, office space and who knows what else. Up until now it served as an improvised storage for the shopping mall. The desire fueling the development has not been able to trigger the use of the space. Or has it?

The exhibition works around all these conditions, thinking about ideas of looking as desiring as well as the status of images and objects as devices that produce desire, whatever form that desire may take: owning, loving, lusting, longing, hoping, etc. The works presented all have in common their willingness to be looked at. Each of them longs to be the object of desire of the visitors' gaze.