Jahn und Jahn and Encounter are pleased to present 'Occidente', a film by Ana Vaz in the gallery's (Projectspace). This installation of 'Occidente' marks the first presentation of the Brazilian filmmaker and artist's critically acclaimed film at a gallery in Lisbon. Ana Vaz lives and works between Paris and Brasília. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible. Relying heavily on the intricacies between memory and forgetfulness, Vaz poetically layers sound and image, splicing between fragmentary scenes in a variety of disparate cinematic formats. Through a montage of 16-mm film, HD video and various found footage, the 15 minute video work traces the remains of Portugal’s colonial rule in Brazil and how the effects forever bind the two countries.

'Antiques become reproducible dinner sets, exotic birds become luxury currency, exploration becomes extreme-sport-tourism, monuments become geodata. A film-poem of an ecology of signs tracing a colonial history repeating itself: celebration and power relations, objects and fetishes, roots and branches, power and class relations in a struggle to find ones place, ones sitting around a table.'

Biography Ana Vaz (1986, Brazil) is an artist and filmmaker born in the Brazilian midwest inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Originally from the cerrado and wonderer by choice, Ana has lived in the arid lands of central Brazil and southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and in the northeastern shores of the Atlantic. Her filmography activates and questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and instrument capable of dehumanising the human, expanding its connections with forms of life — other than human or spectral. Consequences or expansion of her cinematography, her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations or collective walks. Recent showings of her work include: “It is Night in America”, solo show at Jeu de Paume (Paris, France), Pivô (São Paulo, Brazil) and Escola das Artes (Porto, Portugal); "Shéhérazade, at night”, group show at Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France); "Penumbra", group show at Complesso dell'Ospedaletto (Venice, Italy); Biennale Gherdëina (with Nuno da Luz), group show (Dolomites, Italy). Recent screenings include Locarno Film Festival - Cineasti del Presente (Switzerland); Berlinale - Forum Expanded (Germany); New York Film Festival (USA); "Artist in Focus: Ana Vaz", Courtisane (Ghent, Belgium); "Rétrospective Ana Vaz”, 5th Weekend of Latin American Cinema in Reflet Médicis (Paris, France). Her first feature film, É Noite na América (2022), has received awards in Locarno, Festival dei Popoli, Entrevues Belfort, FIDOCS.