A new museum is slated to open in Portugal in April around the contemporary art collection of José Teixeira, the chairman of dstgroup, a civil construction and public-works engineering company. The institution in Braga, about an hour by car or train from Porto in the northwest of Portugal, will showcase a collection of 1,500 artworks under the name MUZEU—Thought & Contemporary Art dst.
“The collection champions artists and bodies of work with strong poetic, philosophical, and political dimensions, engaging questions of memory, power, identity, labor, resistance, and freedom,” according to a press release announcing a public opening date of April 25. Artists foregrounded as highlights in the collection include Pablo Picasso, Anselm Kiefer, Nan Goldin, Richard Long, Candida Höfer, André Butzer, Sue Webster & Tim Noble, Caio Reisewitz, Jason Martin, Paula Rego, Helena Almeida, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Julião Sarmento.
The first show at MUZEU will be “Abrir Abril” (which translates as “Open April”), an exhibition organized in mind of the anniversary of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, a military coup that ended a decades-long dictatorship in 1974. The show draws on the work of German historian Reinhart Koselleck and, per the release, “approaches revolution not simply as a sequence of political events, but as an experience of historical time in which social relations and future imaginaries are rapidly reconfigured.”
Opening day on April 25 will include a “large-scale street intervention” titled Poetry Is in the Street by the artist collective Oficina Arara and performance artist Doutor Urânio. The event will kick off a planned program of conferences, performances, jazz concerts, listening sessions, philosophy workshops for children, and guided visits at MUZEU, which aspires to be “a long-term public platform for contemporary art, mediation, and critical thought within the European cultural landscape.”
