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Established in 2010 and consolidated in its present form in 2013, Underdogs works with a diversified roster of Portuguese and international artists connected with the urban inspired contemporary art universe, fostering the development of close relationships between creators, the public, and the city with the aim of promoting art as an everyday experience.
Starting off with a title which, in an intentional and immediate way, imprints a provocative tone onto this exhibition, Wasted Rita invites once again to enter a staging with performative contours that serves as a vehicle to share with us a critical reading – with the habitual mordant and poetic straightforwardness that characterises her discourse – of various domains of contemporary popular culture – particularly television, the Internet, and other visual media – that habitually capture her attention in her daily life.
Inspired by the black hole of procrastination into which she usually falls when she lets herself be captured by easy and light entertainment contents – yet intelligently conceived to seduce and capture wide audiences –, the artist resorts to various of these formats and reinterprets them in order to materialise another chapter of the intimate narrative she has been developing in the course of a practice that transcends the exhibition space and blurs the boundaries between life and art.
Framed by an enveloping and somewhat absurd environment, a scenic space that welcomes us like a type of brave new world, we find here an ensemble of several installations – each of which formed by an aggregate of pieces in various media – that challenge us to a performative participation in the interaction we develop with them. In each of these installations, the artist explores disparate and seemingly disconnected topics based on these media-infused realities, scrutinised through her critical conscience and blunt satirical humour: the weak representation of women in the art world; covert racism in the entertainment industry; the irresistible attractiveness of the more mainstream and mundane trash and reality TV; the more recent niche #trends; boys clubs and widespread toxic masculinity; the way in which even conscious consumerism can, contradictorily, feed neoliberal greed and gentrification.
The common factor that unifies all of these installations is entertainment. All of them demand our participation in order to let us to see the elements that compose them. The result of this sum of ludic components is an eclectic proposition that simulates a plural authorship, a diversified space where unfolds a vast set of visual manipulations which, beyond their superficial entertainment value, compel us to reflect on the frivolity but also on the importance and the impact that these themes and these contents have on our very own lives.
