Paula Albuquerque
Paula Albuquerque is an Amsterdam-based Portuguese artist and scholar. She is currently Senior Researcher at Gerrit Rietveld Academie and Assistant Researcher at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the latter in collaboration with EYE Film Museum and the Portuguese Cinematheque. Since 2024, she has been a member of the Supervisory Board of the Framer Framed foundation.
Paula Albuquerque’s practice questions the legitimacy of archives that create social stereotypes, which still haunt the contemporary social fabric. Assembling historical and contemporary moving image and photographic materials, she analyses how they support politics of dispossession and discriminating racialised and gendered representation
For her latest solo exhibition Colonised Landscapes and Spectral Deterritorialised Flora (2024) at Zone2Source in Amsterdam, Albuquerque focuses on the portrayal of the colonised landscape in formerly occupied territories, alongside the role of early film as a form of proto-surveillance in sustaining and perpetuating colonial structures. The material is drawn from the Eye Film Museum archive, including home movies made between 1912 and 1940 in the former East and West Indies, which depicts Dutch settlers’ journeys that shaped how the Netherlands perceived its overseas territories.
As an artist, Paula Albuquerque has had several solo exhibitions to her name, including: galleries Zone2Source (2024); Bradwolff Projects (2023, 2018, 2015), Looiersgracht 60 (2023) and Nieuw Dakota (2020). Her films have been presented at International Film Festivals DocLisboa (2023), Sheffield DOC|Fest (2020) and IFFR Rotterdam (2016).
She presented papers at conferences Media in Transition at MIT; NECSUS Conference; and Visible Evidence. She published the books Enter the Ghost – Haunted Media Ecologies (2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (2018).
