Adriana Barreto's interactions between dance, performance, video, photo and art spaces come within a movement inaugurated in the sixties by Merce Cunningham who brought live and ephemeral performances into the museums and established active collaborations between different forms of art while maintaining their entire independence.

On the initiative of the Lisbon art gallery Cristina Guerra, the versatile Brazilian artist presented a series of three event-exhibitions, being - Bodily Extensions
the third and final set of this series. The multi-dimensional experience combined a video-recorded dance performance without public, a black and white photographic series shot during this closed door performance and a second live and ephemeral dance representation staged in front of an audience during the exhibition at the gallery space, thus bringing the three artistic media into a complementary coexistence.

The photographic series is composed of eight black and white images printed on, cotton paper with platinum metals and palladium. It emphasizes the appearance, presence, movement and stillness of the body, its relationship with the space and its interactions with abstract tridimensional black and white spheric sculptures. The images feature fragments of the dancer's body, stretched bare feet, bare arms appearing in extension, posed and still, or in a soft round gesture, feet and hands extended together in opposite directions… The rest of the dancer's body, all dressed in black, together with her head and face disappear completely on the opaque anthracite background producing sharp contrasts between the human forms and the sculptural shapes, between the whites and the blacks, the highlights and shadow areas. Body and spatiality are essential components of Barreto's visual interventions as she specifically focuses here on how the body playfully and silently invests its surrounding space through a sequence of meditative yet highly precise movements and extensions.

KS