Guimaraes, Portugal, Sept. 3, 2026 (Lusa) - Brazilian transdisciplinary artist Tales Frey is opening an exhibition this month in Guimarães, featuring works created from hundreds of kilos of clothes that had been discarded in rubbish bins across northern Portugal, it was announced on Thursday.
«By shifting these clothes from the waste stream to the exhibition space, Frey confronts the public with the paradox of accelerated clothing production and its rapid obsolescence,» reads the introductory text for «Quando um Corpo já não está presente» [When a Body is No Longer Present], which opens on the 12th at the CAAA – Centre for Art and Architecture.
In this exhibition, much like another opening this month in Lisbon, the artist «invites reflection on sustainability, consumption, memory, identity and collective responsibility».
The works he presents in «Quando um Corpo já não está presente» were created «from the collection of hundreds of kilograms of clothing abandoned in urban bins in northern Portugal».
«The pieces cease to be mere waste and come to function as traces of absent lives, bodies and stories, revealing what consumer society insists on rendering invisible», reads the exhibition's introductory text.
The exhibition «Em Suspensão»[In Suspension], due to open on 25 September – National Sustainability Day – at the National Costume Museum in Lisbon, brings together recent works «that explore clothing as a political body, an archive of memories and a critical tool, linking environmental, social and identity-related issues».
This exhibition «takes on an additional symbolic dimension as it takes place at a unique moment in the history» of the National Costume Museum, which is currently closed for refurbishment works.
«The exhibition will be open to the public, reaffirming that a museum's mission extends beyond its buildings and is realised through continued access to culture, critical thinking and the encounter between art and society», the document states.
The exhibition includes the talk «Performative Garment: body, memory and resistance in contemporary art», which will take place on the opening day.
With the two exhibitions opening this month, Tales Frey draws attention to «one of the greatest environmental crises of our time: the impact of the fashion industry and the throwaway culture».
«The two exhibitions propose taking a stand against an economic model based on overproduction, the exploitation of resources and disposability. By transforming discarded clothes into sculptures and installations, Tales Frey questions the fate of fabrics and the relationships between consumption, the body, memory and citizenship,» he emphasises.
Tales Frey, born in 1982 in São Paulo, is a postdoctoral researcher, lecturer and research assistant at the University of Minho.
Over the course of 20 years of artistic practice, Tales Frey «introduces the concept of the ‘performative garment' and discusses clothing as a symbolic extension of the body, a political device and a tool for social participation».
His work has been featured in exhibitions both in Portugal and abroad, and is represented in «major international public collections».
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