Artist
Maria Peixoto Martins
In 2014, she began studies in Cinema, Video and Multimedia Communication, and in 2018 she completed a Bachelor’s degree in Photography at Universidade Lusófona. In 2023, she enrolled in a Master’s degree in Communication and Multimedia at IADE, which she completed the following year.
In her artistic practice, she primarily explores photography, video and installation. Her work focuses mainly on social issues, often using humor, with the human body occupying a prominent place. Questions of surveillance, representation and self-representation are central to her projects. She investigates the deconstruction and limits of the digital image, such as pixelation and chromatic aberrations.
Since 2022, she has held solo exhibitions including ON: Smile! You’re on camera, Livraria Zé dos Bois, Lisbon (2026); Eyes on You, Centro de Artes e Cultura de Ponte de Sor (2024); and The King of the Rood, as part of Segundas na Z, Zé dos Bois, Lisbon (2024). She has also participated in group exhibitions since 2017, such as Imagination – Tools to Think About the Future, organized by Lisbon Art Weekend at Mono, Lisbon (2025), and Random, Azan Contemporary Art, Lisbon (2024).
She took part in the Serra do Açor Artistic Residency under the mentorship of photographer Jem Southam, as well as the Inter.meada artistic residency in Alvito. She was a finalist at the 2022 Vila Franca de Xira Photography Biennial and received the Duplacena Incentive Award at the FUSO – Video Art Festival in 2023.
ON: Smile! You’re on camera
200+ surveillance cameras
90+ locations
A project developed entirely through the web, where photographs are captured from online surveillance cameras spread across the world and sounds are extracted from digital sources. Like an orchestra, I gather all these elements, allowing the sound to guide the viewer on a journey through diverse images, where they begin to form relationships with one another. These are real moments and real people, often unaware that they are crossing the screens of thousands. A space where I, you, and so many others have already been, are now, and inevitably will be.
Eunice Pais develops a practice that brings together photography, video, sound and material processes as forms of listening and relation, operating in contexts where ecology, memory and labour intersect. Working across liminal spaces between archive and lived experience, her work resists closed narratives and extractive modes of representation, proposing an ethics of care through gestures of containment, opacity and material transformation.
Francisco Menezes works across photography, installation and sculpture to question the role of objects in the material and symbolic organization of the contemporary world. Situated between representation and presence, his practice exposes mechanisms of accumulation and fixation, using minimal formal operations to reveal the invisible infrastructures that shape everyday life.
Guillermo Vidal develops a photographic practice rooted in experiences of social invisibility, working in close relation with contexts marked by precarity and structural absence. Rejecting both spectacle and distance, his images operate at the threshold of visibility, proposing asustained ethics of looking grounded in proximity, presence and continuity.
Jungeun Lee explores experiences of displacement, care and unstable belonging, using photography in dialogue with performance and gesture. Her work brings together intimate and structural dimensions, family, domestic labour, migration and cultural inheritance, to trace processes of transformation and silent resistance, where the body becomes a site of memory and care.
Maria Peixoto Martins interrogates surveillance as a defining condition of contemporary life, working with appropriated and degraded images captured in contexts of control. Through irony and discomfort, her practice exposes the normalization of the vigilant gaze and places the viewer in an ambivalent position, revealing systems in which continuous exposure has become the norm.
Members of the jury:
Jayne Dyer - co-artistic director of the Bienal Fotografia do Porto
Virgílio Ferreira - founder and art director of the Photography Platform Ci.CLO and of the Bienal Fotografia do Porto
Vera Carmo - independent curator, lecturer and researcher