(capsules) is a series of temporary installations that take over vacant shop windows, bringing contemporary art proposals to unexpected corners of the city and opening up urban spaces to contemporary creation 24/7.
(capsules) benefits from the generous support of the City of Luxembourg.
With the kind support of Quintet Private Bank
Joana Duarte
New Images from the Past
Location
Quintet Private Bank, 2 display windows
Grand-Rue, L-1661 Luxembourg
This proposal develops from New Images From the Past (2024), an installation in which family photographs are placed inside transparent boxes filled with chemical solution. Over time, the images slowly dissolve, so that every time the work is seen, it exists in a slightly different state.
For Capsules, Joana Duarte brings this work into a storefront window, where it can exist in direct relation to the street. The installation is composed of small containers, each holding a photograph submerged in solution. The work is not about presenting finished images, but about witnessing their gradual disappearance.
Duarte keeps the structure simple and repetitive. The identical units create a rhythm that feels archival, almost systematic, but this system slowly breaks down over time. Repetition is what makes the disappearance visible: viewers begin to notice subtle differences between one box and another, even though they all started from the same condition.
Light also plays an important role. During the day, reflections from the street interfere with the glass and the liquid, partially merging the outside environment with the images inside the boxes. At night, the installation becomes quieter and more suspended, almost floating in the darkness of the window. It never appears the same twice.
Although Duarte has presented this work before, the photographs used are always originals from her family archive, making each installation irreversible and impossible to recreate exactly. For Capsules, she presents a new group of images and adapts the composition specifically to the space. Rather than arranging the boxes in a strict horizontal line, the structure shifts subtly: some boxes suspended higher, others lower, creating small changes in rhythm, perspective and visual tension.
Duarte also includes a wall vinyl print derived from one of the immersed photographs, creating a more direct and enlarged encounter with an image already in the process of disappearing inside the installation.
These are not neutral photographs. They come from a family archive that has long functioned as both preservation and construction. What is being allowed to dissolve is not only the image itself, but the stability it once held as evidence of a coherent family history. The goal is not for the preservation of images, but for a controlled undoing of their authority. The window becomes a space where memory is exposed to instability, and where what once appeared fixed gradually loses its claim to certainty.
Biography
Working with family archives, transfer processes, erosion, and erasure, Joana Duarte explores how images fabricate memory, silence, and unstable narratives. Her practice often takes the form of fragile objects and spatial installations that question the authority and permanence of photographic images, extending photography into material and performative registers.
Her work has been exhibited in Portugal and internationally, including "Miroir Miroir", Biennale de l'Image Possible (Liège, 2026), “ONGEKEND Young Masters” at KERSGALLERY (Amsterdam, 2026), “Red: Pain as a Condition” at Period Gallery (Sydney, 2026), “Strategy of Gestures” at Hippolyte Gallery (Helsinki, 2026), “Run, Pony, Run” at NoisyroomProjects (London, 2026), Arco Lisboa Art Fair (2026), “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Lies” at Raamgalerie De Prachtvink (Groningen, 2025), “What is the First Image You Remember?” at Zero Art Space (Tokyo, 2025), “Corrente de Ar” (Lisbon, 2023), and the Photography Biennale (Vila Franca de Xira, 2022).
She was awarded the Millennium BCP Young Art Prize (2023) and, in 2025, received the Laboratório de Coisas Inúteis artistic creation grant. She has participated in residency and research-based production contexts in Portugal and the Netherlands, and is currently studying in the Fine Arts and Design Masters in Frank Mohr Institute (NL).
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