Exhibition | HARD WATER, SOFT STONE
September 16th to 25th, 2026
Exhibition view. Photography: Bruno Lopes
GROUP EXHIBITION:
Bruno Parente, Cecil Serres, Chaeyeon Kang, David Lopes, Eduardo Sousa Ribeiro, Filipe Real Marinheiro, Hyungee Kang, Maria Gomes, Melanie Loureiro, Naira Pennacchi, Pietra Galli, Susana Moreira, Zoe Sua Kay
TEXT:
Susana Rocha
Between water and stone, a tension emerges: what appears immutable is slowly altered by what seems fragile. It is from this relation that HARD WATER, SOFT STONE considers matter not as a stable condition, but as a body in constant negotiation between hardness and fluidity, permanence and erosion, the visible and theinvisible, the real and the imagined. The exhibition inhabits this unstable interval, where forms shift, meanings transform, and what appears solid reveals its ownvulnerability.
Taking its cue from the premise “hard water, soft stone”, the works gathered here seem to gravitate towards realms associated with alchemy, mysticism, andhybridity. They evoke practices that operate within liminal territories, where materials, symbols, bodies, and temporalities encounter and contaminate one another. In this sense, the idea of alchemy emerges less as a historical reference than as a methodological possibility: to transform, combine, decompose, recompose. A way of questioning what exists through what it contains beyond the immediately visible; of searching, within what is present, for what has yet to reveal itself.
At the same time, the broader notion of hybridity runs through the exhibition as a possibility of existing between categories. Bodies that merge, substances thatassume other configurations, images that seem to belong simultaneously to different times or worlds. Factual and imagined memories, plausible and fabricatedbeings, forms suspended between identities and states. Rather than dissolving boundaries, these works render them porous, allowing one thing to contain, or become, another.
Taken together, the works resist overly predictable boundaries and suggest that identity (of objects, bodies, and memories) is also constituted through overlaps, displacements, failures, and residues. Within this territory, the mystical does not necessarily emerge as an answer, but as an opening towards what remainsirreducible to explanation.
Fragments, traces, and remnants bring us closer to something that can no longer be recovered in its entirety. Between what persists and what is lost, memoryceases to be merely a place of preservation and becomes an ongoing process of recomposition. It is also within this liminal space that certain images seem to persist throughout the exhibition: birds as “magical” creatures inhabiting both earth and air; doors, portals, and stairways as sites of passage and transition betweendifferent spaces and states; skin as an organic and ambiguous geography, simultaneously surface and boundary; water as a metaphor for purification or, (at least,) renewal; and stone, finally, as a plane upon which the world is inscribed and on which time leaves its marks.
It is within this field of instability that HARD WATER, SOFT STONE takes shape: an exploration of change that does not seek to establish a single narrative oftransformation. The works do not illustrate a common concept, nor do they follow a shared formal logic. They draw closer, move apart, and establish relationshipsthat are at times subtle, at times contradictory. Their affinity perhaps lies in their willingness to work with what resists, embracing it as a poetic possibility.
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