Emoplux

Cristina Dias de Magalhães presents in the Chapel of Neumünster Abbey the series L’autre-portrait and Embody, the result of a photographic and philosophical quest on the hidden side of our identity and body.

L’autre-portrait confronts the observer with the faceless portrait. Each model expresses in its own way the hidden side of his identity through the view of his back, facing his intimate desires, runaway feelings or hidden scars. The result illustrates the mediation between visual harmony and inner torment. The artist thus challenges the observer on the entirety of the human being in a perpetual trade-off between what we express and reveal, what we silence and eventually forget. 

In Embody the artist wanders through space and time to make the body and its environment visually and emotionally interact. By superimposing her self-portraits of the back on interiors and exteriors selected from her own archives, she re-connects with the emotions experienced in these places and their after-effects. The places inhabited by this ephemeral presence transform into a reverberation of a period of life, speaking of the artist’s origins, the discovery of her body, her emancipation, the desire to seduce, and finally the becoming a woman.