dialogue #14

PLAY

Helena Almeida & Carina Brandes

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT II by José Freire

Opening 5 December 18h

05.12 - 31.01.2026

dialogue, Marvila

“Play is the highest expression of human development for it alone is the free articulation of what is in the child’s soul.”

– Friedrich Froebel (creator of the kindergarten)

Play, as a concept, became increasingly central to the work of educational theorists in the 19th and 20th centuries. It was recognized as integral to cognitive development: the idea being that from play, both structured and unstructured, flowed a child’s intellectual growth. But for play to become an object of study it had to be identified, then codified. Understanding could only come from definition, from a consensus as to the meaning of “play”. It needed to be differentiated from other constituted forms of behavior so that it could be deemed something wholly original. Although frequently categorized as freedom, play actually invites and invents structures. Most would agree that there is difference between simple play and a game — one imagined as unshackled, the other constrained by rules; one authentic, the other mediated. Competition requires laws, for how else will we know who’s won and who’s lost?

Of course, life is largely a matter of moving away from Froebel’s alles gut as we leave the playground and enter the classroom, as we graduate from school and move on to work. From the structure of games, we had learned regulations, and we used those tools later in life: in the office, in the factory, in the studio, on the killing floor, at the auction house, in the war room. This historical sketch may have little to do with the show under discussion, but it provides a framework to think about frivolity and gamesmanship as fonts for the arts.

PLAY, the exhibition, pairs the work of Portuguese artist Helena Almeida (Lisbon, 1934 – Sintra, 2018) and German photographer Carina Brandes (Braunschweig, 1982). Almeida is here represented by two major late-career video works, while Brandes will show a selection of photographs pulled from the past two decades. The show’s title refers to the way in which both artists use their bodies in the construction of their work, presenting viewers with visual evidence of the authors’ movements in space: their gestures captured for us to see.

A secondary reading of the word PLAY foregrounds the theatrical, flourishes of which are present in both Almeida and Brandes’ creation of a mise-en-scène — in the case of the former, a stripped-down minimalism, in the case of the latter, an explosive expressionism. They both often situate the gestural within their very conceptual practice: Almeida with swatches of her famous blue, Brandes with her strokes of black.

When most of us picture the work of Helena Almeida we call to mind an image of a black and white photograph even though her multi-disciplinary practice included sculpture, painting, drawing and collage. The works representing her here are moving image pieces in which Almeida has cast herself as the principal actress; her oeuvre having emerged from a zeitgeist of conceptual positions flowing from such artists as Lucas Samaras, Vallie Export, Jürgen Klauke, and Hannah Wilke. Like them, she was eventually to use images of the self as a foundation for addressing the world.

Made in 2004 — the artist was 70 at the time — the earliest of the two Almeida videos on view is entitled “The Experience of the Place II”. In it, a woman crisscrosses a tile floor on her knees for just under thirteen minutes. It’s the kind of traversal one might imagine necessary for a deep-cleaning. But is it the memory of one’s grandmother, or of one’s housemaid? And does that memory issue from one’s own IRL or from some cinema-seen backstory?

Almeida’s woman has no bucket, no scrub-brush, so what will her movements produce? Not cleanliness. So, is our imagined hausfrau really a mendicant? Watching her, on her knees, crossing this floor for the umpteenth time, we would be forgiven for assigning her some religious purpose, the Catholic aspects of this performance impossible to ignore. But the domesticity of the image conflicts with that reading. And that domesticity is reinforced by the props dragged into the frame by the actress: a heavy, wooden stool and a rickety metal lamp. Although when she drops her head down to floor level, and plants a kiss there, the secular seems to fly out the window. What is clear is that her movements are arduous. The figure sometimes grabs onto a wall as though supporting herself were difficult, and the sound one hears is of her knees endlessly rubbing against the floor.

Several times the insular world on view is impinged upon by sounds issuing from offscreen space — a phone rings, an airplane flies overhead — Almeida is quotidian in her approach. Her video is temporally discontinuous: its length is interrupted several times as it fades out, then gently returns. The artist is not concerned with impressing us with the duration of her performance, instead she wants us to put our focus elsewhere. In its final moments, when rapturous music intrudes, it freezes our protagonist into place, holding her transfixed for a moment before the music is abruptly silenced and the human figure returns to its mysterious labor.

The second video on view opens in silence, Almeida allowing us to read her image free from its acoustic envelope. This untitled work from 2010, focuses on a similar studio traversal, this time played out by a female and a male figure: the two of them mated by several lengths of plastic-coated metal cord which the woman uses to conjoin the legs of the two participants. Over the course of the piece, the woman is consistently seen adjusting the constraints that hold the couple together, she is the director of the action. But this should not be read solely as a metaphor for marriage but also as indicative of Almeida’s studio practice. The range of motion remains limited, as per her plan, and as the two figures retrace their steps a drawing is rendered upon the tile floor by the repeated scuffing of shoes. Although the work is suffused with melancholy there is also a sense of triumph from the perseverance of its protagonists. They have left their mark.

In both of Almeida’s videos her static camera remains quite literally grounded — it sits on the floor — allowing us to become a part of the scene. Like a Yasujirō Ozu tatami shot, her low angle POV encourages a feeling of objective observation. The simplicity of her approach has a dramatic effect. In both of these works, Almeida insists upon a kind of anonymity, a certain modesty. Although we’re all aware that she is the actor, the information remains extra- textual, and her body can be anyone’s. Or, I should say, any woman’s.

Brandes, although marked by many of the same influences as Almeida, came of age in the period when any female photographer had to contend with the monolithic position of Cindy Sherman. Thankfully, there was another mother available in the figure of Francesca Woodman, who was beginning to gain in prominence, providing a counterpoint that Brandes could also mine. But apart from these post-conceptualists, Brandes’ work found its genesis in the profound impact provided by the films of Ingmar Bergman, particularly the black and white pictures of the 1960s, such as PERSONA and SHAME, which had been lensed by the cinematographer Sven Nykvist. These films take place in settings sometimes bucolic, sometimes industrial, with very little aesthetic differentiation between the two.

Whereas Almeida’s works in the exhibition are insular, confined to her studio and celebratory of that fact, Brandes’ will also burst out-of-doors, her performances liberated from the confines of the studio. Her photos frequently feel as though they’ve been staged in an unyielding environment, the black and white stressing the cold brutality of the spaces. A viewer can almost sense the chill in the air, while the protagonist persona who appears in Brandes’ photographs is a feral presence, often coming across as combative.

Over the course of her two decades as a working photographer, Brandes has remained at the center of her work, embarked on a hero’s journey across an imaginary, psychological landscape that she’s created, whole cloth, in real environs. Using paints and props, fabrics and her own photographic prints, Brandes fashions the world to her liking. Although always manifesting a kind of documentary grit, her work clearly issues from the other side of the looking glass, with other models and animals sometimes enlisted in the creation of metaphysical realms.

Brandes’ work insists on its own materiality: like skins, they hang naked, unprotected, on the gallery’s walls. Their deep mattness — partly a result of their having been printed on baryta paper — accented by a heavy black that grounds her photographs in a palpable starkness. Pushing at the edges of the flat space afforded by pictorial parameters, she labors by various strategies to complexify the layers that make up her images. Always central to her practice, Brandes uses the printing process to add incident and further depth to her photographs. The artist appears sometimes as a spectral figure, or as her own doppelgänger, the photographs taking on the aura of a séance.

Almeida has twice represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale and was the subject of survey shows at the Art Institute of Chicago and at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Brandes has shown extensively in her native Germany at such institutions as the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, the Kunstmuseum in Stuttgart, and at the Kunstvereins in Köln, Heilbronn, Hamburg and Hannover. She has also been the subject of solo exhibitions at White Columns and MOMA/PS1, both in New York.

–– José Freire

This is the second episode in curator José Freire’s ongoing THE HAPPINESS PROJECT.

The Happiness Project is a group of ten curated exhibitions, intended to be held at different venues throughout the United States and Europe between 2025 and 2030. Each episode will carry a subtitle, among them “Nostalgia”, “Money” and “Intimacy”, amplifying the opportunity for every iteration to maintain an air of autonomy within the overall project. The subtitles will also act as cues to the content of each specific show.

The project is partly inspired by William Davies’ book, “The Happiness Industry,” the overarching theme for these shows being the conceptualization of Happiness and the way that culture and commerce define it. Each episode will strive to remain an individual utterance, with little artist overlap, and each of them will be tailored to the program and identity of the gallery that hosts them — either working with, or against, the public’s perception of such. My intention is that the shows will happen at radically different venues, from small galleries to large, from garages to blue-chip spaces.

Additionally, there will be a variety to the artist make-up of each show, from two and three-person exhibitions to larger, thematic groupings; they will include pieces by younger artists and work from estates, work by individuals I’d shown in the past, alongside those I wish I had. The shows will never happen in concert but, rather, will be sufficiently spaced, both geographically and in terms of scheduling, to ensure that they will not cannibalize each other. Stringing the shows out will allow me to second-guess and correct the whole, while still working on individual parts. There need to be exhibitions that I can’t yet see from where I’m sitting in time, writing this.

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 1: ACQUAINTANCE was installed at Lubov Gallery in New York from 28 June through 31 August 2025. It featured work by Linda Daniels, Marilyn Lerner and Jill Levine.

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 2: PLAY is currently on view at Dialogue Gallery in Lisbon. It is comprised of work by Helena Almeida and Carina Brandes.

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT, EPISODE 3: HEARTH & HOME will open at Zero... in Milan on 17 April 2026 and run through July. It includes work by Lizzi Bougatsos, Sylvie Fleury, Richard Hoeck/John Miller, Christian Holstad, Elisabeth Kley, Liam Neff, Kayode Ojo, Patrick Sarmiento, Dash Snow and Nicole Wermers.