LX 2.0 is a curatorial project developed by Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea, a commercial contemporary art gallery based in Lisbon. LX 2.0 is one of the direct consequences of the regular program presented by the Upgrade! Lisbon, a monthly gathering of new media artists, curators, and interested people, also held at Lisboa 20.  

Introduction 1 is a series of seven Introductions, in the form of a conversation, later edited by New York-based Portuguese artists, Pedro Barateiro and Ricardo Valentim, to be published in the book What Is Content? in February 2009. The collaboration between the two artists is centered on the construction and the form that content has in our society. Translation by David Alan Prescott.

Recently the CIA assured us that the destroyed videotapes of hundreds of hours of the interrogations of two detainees in 2002 no longer had intelligence value and that their destruction was nothing but standard procedure to protect the identities of the interrogators. They claim that there is no need for the tapes since the agency determined that their documentary reporting was “full and exacting,” and the crucial information they produced was “accurate and complete.” We’re just going to have to take their word for it. It comes as no surprise that I would tune in and closely follow the reports on this issue.

Nicky Coutts uses imagery that might be recognized from elsewhere. She appropriates paintings, photographs, objects, and stories, some easy to recognize, others lodged more deeply in our collective memory. These borrowed forms are then altered in some way and returned, often seamlessly, to impersonate what they replace. Currently, Coutts is interested in how we visit places for the first time often having heard people tell of them, and seen imagery representing them, in advance. Secondhand experience can become the gaze through which firsthand experience is possible.

The exhibition Best Regards from the Blind Spot is conceived as a rather specific insight into the representations of feminine subjectivity. It should be understood as an ironic intonation of a postcard sent from the place where these artists live: Serbia and Montenegro represents a certain “blind spot” of the art world.

What: Test, a new private non-for-profit contemporary art center–a 30,000 square foot industrial building for new exhibitions, new projects, new collaborations and a new contemporary art collection.

The recent solo exhibition of the Sardinian “raw” outsider artist, Franco Meloni, innovatively curated by Tchera Niyego, was an overwhelming success. A young self-taught artist from Sardinia, Italy, Meloni’s compositions exude a creative sense of the wild and abandon associated with the terrestrial freedom and radiant sunlight of his Mediterranean island home. 

Program’s most recent show, ÜBERleben, closes today before the winter holidays; Christmas being perhaps one of the most important of the German Feiertagen. Strings of lights dot the city streets and steaming pots of spiced wine can be had at the ubiquitous, festive outdoor markets. But the spirit at Program is a little less heartwarming

Doug Fishbone recycles the language of the mass media in order to critique some of the more unseemly aspects of life in the modern age. Appropriating photographic and digital imagery from the Internet, he constructs witty and occasionally shocking film narratives from apparently unrelated material, questioning the way the mind processes controversial visual images and concepts.

Melanie Prapopoulos’ innovatively installed exhibition, Through Her Eyes at Broadway Gallery was a surprising and imaginative treat. The ambience at the opening was lively and vivacious. Born Europe, but raised in the US, Melanie Prapopoulos is the true definition of an international artist. In keeping with this multicultural outlook, much of her work draws from diverse cultural influences.

The main reference point of her art is the concept and not the production of an object. GT also likes to cast an ironic glance at the art world. Since the end of June RitaGT has been interested in the history of collecting and exhibiting practiced in scientific institutions like natural history museums. She is more intrigued by how an event is translated than by the event itself. She finds her themes in respectable art history and in the aggressive everyday life of the metropolis.