NÃO MAIS, MAS AINDA: Ana Teixeira

Ana Teixeira’s work explores how we relate to each other, how we tell our stories, and how we communicate. Whether in her drawings and objects or in her performative actions, her primary interest lies in establishing contact and forging connections between people, things, words, and spaces.

In this new series, titled “NO LONGER, BUT STILL”, the artist presents drawings, objects, photographs, a film, and a performance—each dealing with absence and the strategies we devise to endure it.

The performance, titled: “I Lack Something Made of Wind”, will take place at the opening of the exhibition.

“– It would have been easier to lose an external part of myself.
Love resides inside. Loss, not from conflict, but by nature’s decision, is devastating—like an internal organ being removed. The body no longer functions as it did before. It changes. The pain, like a nail piercing the wrist, is the closest comparison to that unbearable feeling we experience when we realize our finitude. He, the loved one, is no longer here. One day, I will no longer be. Absence becomes what is most present. So, he is still here, only in the form of absence. He did not simply pass away. He is passed.”

The exhibition “No Longer, But Still” by Ana Teixeira processes grief through drawings, photographs, installations, and a performance. If our era no longer provides comforting rituals, or if our society fails to be a supportive collective, then it falls to each of us to invent our own rites of passage. Ana Teixeira does just that—drawing hands that viscerally feel the pain of no longer being able to grasp what they desire. Pierced, burned, squeezed—these hands, drawn in white lines on black paper, repeat the word tattooed on the wrist: still. They are strong, they resist pain.

In two large drawings, also in white on black paper, tree branches—belonging to a realm of the fantastic and the ghostly—seem to stretch out as if trying to inhabit the room. They sprout from the wardrobe, emerge from the bed—they are still there. The shoe becomes a symbol of absence, the flute plays only one melody: the one carried by melancholic branches. In another drawing, a languid hand is overtaken by these sprouts of sadness. It hardly seems to be the same strong hand from the beginning of the process, which allowed itself to be pierced.

Finally, hands and branches merge in a wall installation made of 35 pieces that sometimes resemble small twigs, other times contorted hands. Strength to endure pain and a desire for melancholy are fused into one single form.

The photographs in this exhibition refer to a film whose images have been lost, and from which only a caption remains:

“– And what use is the moon now?”

To cultivate absence, water it with tears, caption it with words—these are strategies to postpone moving on, to remain in the company, at least, of absence. To delay the reinvention of life within this new body, which has lost an appendage. In fact, two: both the loved one and the illusion of infinity. Interestingly, in Portuguese, when someone knows they’re going to die, they are said to be disillusioned. At all other times, we live under the soft illusion of being eternal. One who has lost a loved one is also disillusioned—now living without the appendage of self-deception, fully aware that life ends. Moving forward in this new body is no easy task. Grief rises like a black helium balloon, but it does not easily fly out the window—it lingers on the ceiling of the everyday.

Inflating one hundred black balloons, filling them with breath, injecting into their membranes all the melancholy stored in one’s lungs and hyperoxygenating the body—the performance becomes a beautiful ritual to close the mourning. And to make the ritual collective, the visitor takes home a white balloon, empty, with the inscription “still.” It is up to them to breathe life into it.

— Paula Braga