João Miguel Barros exhibits ‘moments to be pieced together’

João Miguel Barros

João Miguel Barros, a Portuguese lawyer living in Macau for 30 years, recently inaugurated his first solo photography exhibition titled, “Between Gaze and Hallucination.”

Barros was involved in the creation of several exhibitions in Portugal and also works as a freelance curator specifically for photography. He is now displaying a “personal experience” that “tries to demonstrate the opposite of what is politically correct in the trend of modern contemporary photography which usually rests on the idea of telling a story – ‘Storytelling.’”

In this exhibition, the images are intended not to be part of a general timeline but instead could be “autonomous”, with each one telling its own story.

“When I arrived there and I took them [the images], I isolated them and they became without past or future, they became moments frozen in time,” the artist explained to the Times.

He added that the exhibition presents “moments of a timeline that need to be pieced together [by those that observe them].”

“My big challenge was that when someone looked at a photograph, they could think about what would be right before or after it… the sense of that photograph in a present that is no longer its present,” Barros said.

“Between Gaze and Hallucination” will be on display at the Center for Creative Industries (Creative Macau) until March 25. Admission is free of charge.