Joana Vasconcelos

Born in 1971, Joana Vasconcelos is a Portuguese visual artist with a 30-year career, renowned for her monumental sculptures and immersive installations. Decontextualising everyday objects and updating the relationship between arts & crafts to the 21st century, she establishes a prolific dialogue between private and public space, popular heritage and high culture. With irony and humour, she questions the status of women, consumerism society and collective identity.

She gained international recognition in 2005 with the participation of A Noiva in the first Venice Biennale curated by women, followed by Trafaria Praia, the biennale's first floating pavilion representing Portugal in 2013. She was the youngest artist and the only woman to exhibit at the Château de Versailles, in 2012, and the first Portuguese artist at the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2018. Her works are part of international public and private collections, including those of the Calouste Gulbenkian, François Pinault and Louis Vuitton foundations. From Lisbon to the world, she has run Atelier Joana Vasconcelos since 2006 and created in 2012 the Joana Vasconcelos Foundation, which supports social causes and promotes art for all.

The workshop she designed for PTS is an extension of her experience in making the film Hand-Made in 2008. For a year, she invited a group of women from different generations and nationalities to crochet and knit along a route defined by some of Portugal's most important monuments, from the Belém Tower to the Alcobaça Monastery. The film highlights the universal and silent language of crochet, a craft and cultural practice shared by different societies, while focusing our attention on the relationship between crafts and heritage and the transmission of knowledge, which is essential for the artist.

Similarly, visitors are invited to take part in a collective work at the PTS, transformed by Joana Vasconcelos into a crochet workshop with traditional furniture, the Wheel of Creativity.