Rui Calçada Bastos

Working with and in the cities that he travelled to or lived in (Macau, Shanghai, Paris, Lisbon, Berlin, Los Angeles, Rio de Janeiro), Rui Calçada Bastos, (Lisbon, 1971) focuses on urban landscapes, objects, shapes and situations that would perhaps be overlooked at a first glance. Both in a real and metaphorical sense, the reflections, duplications and confrontations constitute variations on a leitmotiv that runs through Rui Calçada Bastos’s videos, photographs and installations dealing with the self and the other, inner and outer, the here and there. The artist continually changes his position in a perpetual attempt to reach towards self-assurance or anchorage, which never seem to take place.