Pablo’s Birthday is pleased to present Claiming to be finding, a solo exhibition by Alice Quaresma. Within her practice, Quaresma abandons the assertion of objectivity and shifts the content of images into partially figurative, partially abstract collages. Her engagement with the photographic structure plays with the relationship between depth/flatness and representation/abstraction, using geometry as a universal way to play with objectivity. Quaresma investigates the limits of photography as a medium of truth and precision in relation to the condition of memory.

Looking to the Neo-Concrete movement– a 1950s Brazilian art movement that applied a greater sensuality, color, and poetic feeling to the concrete art movment– Quaresma deconstructs her images from her archive with paint, pencil, crayon, paper, and other materials in search of a disconnection and fragmentation. Implementing shapes or lines of color on top of the images or perhaps adding a second image layer, Quaresma’s approach is spontaneous and non-linear, allowing her to document discoveries and the unknown as she reworks and reinterprets.

In Claiming to be finding, Quaresma uses these disruptive elements to visualize feelings of detachment that arise from her experience immigrating from Brazil to London and the US. Claiming to be finding was born by observing these feelings– whether prompted by a cultural, emotional, or physical separation. Through this process, geography of the presented landscape is lost, embodying past memories, constantly searching for a sense of belonging. Quaresma revisits each moment, seeking to forge new connections with the photographs from her past, provoking nostalgia, and recalling the emotions, scents, tastes, and feels associated with each moment.

By merging abstraction with personal history, she invites viewers to reflect on their own connections to place and identity, ultimately challenging the notion of photography as a proxy of memory. Through this lens, she underscores the complexities of cultural, emotional, and physical displacement with the ongoing search for connection.