| Ana Pérez-Quiroga: Rather Dead than Donkey |
 I Hate Being Fat, Please Eat Me, 2002. Piece of a set of plates in printed porcelain. Ana Pérez-Quiroga is a Portuguese contemporary artist working and living in Lisboa. In 2002 she made her first solo exhibition “Tell Me You Love Me”, at Filomena Soares Gallery and, since then she has been regularly exhibiting her work in Portugal and Spain. Ana works with different media such as photography, installations, knitting or pottery and explores a wide range of subjects from love to artistic discourses/institutions. At the age of 47, Ana is still looking for her place in the Portuguese art scene. Due to her heterogeneous academic background that comprises History, Design and Sculpture studies, Ana’s work deals with ideological, formal, aesthetic and ethic problems of artistic production. She constructs her critical views about these issues by displacing ordinary or personal objects from the real world into the artistic discourses and practices.
 Warm me up at night, 2002. 80 pairs of sleepers in embroided textile with 80 texts. The first project exhibited, at the Museum of Chiado (Lisboa), displayed a collection of objects such as ashtrays, glasses, gloves that she had stolen from a number of museums and other cultural institutions. By labelling, classifying and reproducing them, Ana attributed new meanings to this ordinary “things”. On the second project for the National Museum of Ancient Art, she rescues one of Josefa de Óbidos (1630-1684) paintings, which belongs to the museum’s collection, and creates her self-portrait. By blending herself with the painted crystal compote’s container of the picture, Ana established an encounter/dialogue between a woman artist from the seventeenth century and a contemporary one. While the historical imagery meets the present through reproduction and digital manipulation, Ana reflects herself in the manufactured objects of the past. Besides this critical approach to the world of the arts, Ana is also interested in the world of the commodities/objects that surround our daily life, in the language/speech we use to communicate and create meaningful identities thus, more recently, she has been focused on other artistic practices like the Indian or the Moroccan fabrics and tapestries. The exhibitions “Tell me you Love Me” (Lisboa 2002) and “Rather Dead than Donkey” (Vigo 2006) are two good examples of how Ana challenges the viewers to think about their daily pleasures, fears, desires and relationships by interacting with different objects like a cotton candy machine, stinky perfume sticks or a pair of donkey’s ears. Ana thinks that ordinary objects have an ability to generate a sense of intimacy similar to a “uterine space”, which detach them from masculine domination. She is also looking for other materials, techniques and representations of life beyond the limits of hegemonic discourses that tend to privilege Eurocentrism, (hetero) sexism and patriarchy.  Rather Dead than a Donkey, 2006. 19 donkey ears in embroided grey felt with different sentences. Ana is aware that she can’t detach her sexual, political and social identities from the way she does her works, that’s why, when faced with the question “Is your work political?” she replies: “I am political. I can’t separate the two. I believe that being political has its subversive appealing… in some way I want to revolutionize, change something…as a feminist/white/lesbian I do my own critical reflections…I am looking for my own space, for my own voice. I would like that my pieces could have other meanings than the ones that are part of the dominant discourses.”  Still Life: Boxes, Earthenware, Flowers and Self Portrait, 2003. Digital color photography printed on canvas. Here you can also see a video of Ana Perez-Quiroga and Patrícia Guerreiro As Aventureiras / The adventurers, Video b/w, 4´
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