Mónica de Miranda is a Portuguese artist of Angolan ancestry who lives and works between Lisbon, Portugal and Luanda, Angola. Born in 1976, her disciplines include photography, filmmaking, and research. She works on postcolonial issues of geography, history, and subjectivity mostly related to Africa and its diaspora. De Miranda’s work is research-based and looks at the convergence of politics, memory, and space. Her works frequently reflects her view on urban and peri-urban, Luso-African landscape and associated contemporary and colonial history. It is based on themes of urban archaeology and affective geographies. She graduated in Visual Arts and Sculpture and completed an MSc and PhD in Artistic Studies in London.
De Miranda is most famous for her photographic documentation of the ruins of modern hotels in post-war Angola, and of its sociopolitical significance. The project Panorama borrows the name of a well-known, once prosperous hotel, a modernist building now in ruins, situated on Cape Island, in Luanda. De Miranda photographed this building alongside the Karl Marx Cinema. These images evoke the past and raise uncomfortable but still relevant questions, about issues such as architectural heritage, post-colonialism, and gentrification. Accordingly, the spectator is invited to reflect on the structures of power involved in the construction and destruction of an urban landscape.
Cinema Karl Marx, called Cinema Avis prior to independence, was a modernist theatre in Luanda built during the colonial era. Now abandoned, the building is an uncomfortable reminder of the colonial past and the civil war. De Miranda fixes the image of the place in an attempt to prevent its erasure from memory. According to de Miranda these ruins exist out of their time and resist attempts to forget or erase Angola’s history.
De Miranda is Director and artistic coordinator at Hangar, an art research center in Lison founded in 2014. Additionally she is a co-founder of Xerem, a cultural association that runs international residencies and workshops for artists. She researches sociocultural and political aspects of contemporary migration movements linked to lusophone Africa for the University of Lisbon. She was an artist in residence at the Artchipelago French Institute in Mauritius Islands. Her individual exhibitions include the New Geographies exhibition at 198 Gallery in London. On the other hand her group exhibitions include the São Jorge Island at the 14th Biennial of Architecture of Venice.
