Margarida Sardinha is an independent artist & director born in Lisbon, Portugal - 1978, who studied, lived and worked in London for ten years. She attended Fine Art Combined Media studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Her cross-media practice comprises site-specific installation, experimental film and animation, performance, text, sound, video, photography and symbolic study drawings, which are by definition geometric-kinetic and abstract neoformalist works. Their main focus is the conceptuality of geometrical optical illusions a propos the spiritual in art, thus, making concept parallels within literature, philosophy, comparative religion, science, film and art. Using these perceptions she searches for spiritual/psychological stages of consciousness and relates them with cycles of individual or universal growth. She re-accesses the deconstruction of dogmas from a geometric-archetypal stand in which the relation between immutability and mutability is constantly challenged and reviewed through dynamic symmetry. Archetypal geometry, relative symmetries, symbology and colour being the basis of the work are explored in a semiotically liminocentric process of building, photographing and animating these “signs” that are understood as imprinted/innate forms of consciousness which enable us to see, hear and speak aesthetically, emotionally, logically, spiritually and politically.
Hence, her work exposes the metaphysical concern with religion and how it can be conveyed in a global consumerist, post-Nietzschean and post-Marxist society thus reflecting analogically but not arithmetically upon the fractal progression of geometric symbols recursively complementary to much of worldwide science, communications and human behaviour. She conveys the illusionary duality of dogma and change by exploring the mind generated relationship between “sign” and “symbol” through constant repetition, thus mapping a hyparxis mental "atemporal line" based on the treatise of optics and prosody which reflect psychokinetic ideas regarding consciousness at any given period. By translating the emotional potential of human essence and making it an equivalent with the concepts of symbolic cognition, sensorial and mental projection – epiphenomenon – she attempts to explain the irrepressible tendency of the mind to assemble random and manmade marks and translate these into intelligible data. These "mind lines" hyparxis oscillate between the atemporal-divine and temporal-human founded on memory and belief where the perceptions acquired by the five senses become meta-impressions when worked upon by the faculty of imagination, thus being incidental self-referential images which become the mirror of proto-intellectual knowledge. Illusion being the result of the interaction between instinct, perception and thought while knowledge derives from its deconstruction is hence rendered as a poetic-symbolic-continuums formed by the emergence of an “acausal” unconsciously hermetic and/or mystical consciousness. She thus introduces different streams of consciousness and perspectives, which are inherent in each person centred on individual and collective cultural interpretations in a variety of illusionary and paradoxical liminocentric modules. They reveal the polarised schisms intrinsic to the assimilation and accommodation of the conscious and unconscious human physical behaviour and its mental maturity; this dialectical, spiritual and religious dichotomy of consciousness versus unconscious describes an incidental synchronistic movement towards unification and integration of all interior selves that seem directed for aleatoric dispersal and still they inevitably connect as a whole.
Main artistic, conceptual & spiritual influences
Art - John Latham, LeWitt, Turrell, Howard Hodgkin, Joseph Kosuth, Kapoor, Tacita Dean, Rovner, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Klee, Matisse, Spencer Finch, Ellsworth Kelly
Film & Video - Terrence Malick, Godard, Kubrick, Oskar Fischinger, Everett Smith, James & John Whitney, Bill Viola, Nam June Paik, Stan Brahkage, Tarkosvki, Pipiloti Rist
Literature - Fernando Pessoa, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Goethe, W. B. Yeats, Italo Calvino, Albert Camus, J. L. Borges, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Umberto Eco
Philosophy - Plato, Kant, Henri Bergson, Theodor Adorno, Carl Jung, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze
Science - Euclid, Einstein, Isaac Newton, Matila Ghyka, Benoit Mandelbrot, Keith Critchlow, Henri Poincaré, Roger Penrose, Douglas Hofstadter
Religion - (besides various sacred scriptures) Robert Fludd, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Sri Aurobindo, J. Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Shri Ramakrishna, Sri Shankaracharya
Margarida Sardinha Résumé
Margarida Sardinha is the director of Master Mercy Matrix (2013), London Memory multi+city (2013) and HyperLightness ad absurdum (2011) experimental film that won the laurels of Best Experimental Film at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, Great Lakes Film Festival, Creative Arts Film Festival & Bridge Fest (Vancouver) and Best Spiritual & Religious Film at the Directors Circle Film Festival; it further won an Honourable Mention at the 23rd New Orleans Film Festival and the Awards of Merit by the Lucerne International Film Festival, The Indie, The Accolade and Rochester International Film Festival. The film was 2012 Official Selection of over 20 film festivals worldwide such as: Revelation Perth International Film Festival, San Francisco Frozen Film Festival (nominated for Best Experimental Film), 10th In the Palace International Short Film Festival, Take Two Film Festival in New York, MIA@TheArmory, Beam Festival, 5th Columbia Gorge International Film Festival, MIX on Transmedia Writing and Digital Creativity, 7th International Streaming Festival, Denver Underground Film Festival, New Jersey Film Festival, Rockland Shorts International Series, Gold Lion Film Festival, Magmart Film & Video Festival... She has also exhibited her site-specific installation work both in museums, galleries and biennales in London, Lisbon and New York with the most important being: the solo show “Darkness Reflexions” at the Fernando Pessoa Museum comprising three site-specific installations “As Above, so Below...”, “The Gods have not died...”, “Darkness Reflexions” and “Darkness Reflexions Sketchbook” an 80 page exhibition catalogue; selected for “Pan-Demonium” at AC Institute [Direct Chapel] with “HyperSelf Light Dance”; selected for Red Bull Music Academy Showcase with ”They had a whole army sitting on their door step (…) Gil Vicente and “I detest your views but am prepared to die for your right to express them (Voltaire)”; selected for Bienal Jovens Valoures 2009 at Galeria Vieira da Silva with “The Master”. Margarida was also one of the founders of the London based art group pARTart and the curator of the group’s exhibition “London Recycled” at the Menier Chocolate Factory comprising 22 new works by the group’s artists comprising ten diverse artistic discipline’s and eleven different background nationalities exploring London’s multiculturalism and multidisciplinary pluralism; through the show and its collateral promotional and fundraising events where she performed Vjing at several London’s East End venues along with the performances of invited emerging music bands and other members of the group live pieces, she created over one year the necessary conditions for these artists to produce new work re-accessing their respective individual cyclic experience of London’s living making it a collective mirror of the city’s arts scenery. She won the Prize of Jovens Criadores (Young Creators Prize) awarded by the Portuguese Cultural Ministry and the Grupo Artes e Ideias in 1999.
