Augusto Alves da Silva

Portugal, 1963
Augusto Alves da Silva was born in 1963 in Lisbon. With two scholarships from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, he obtained his B.A. (Hons) in Photography from the London College of Printing (1989) and completed his M.F.A. in Media at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1997). Using photography, but also video and installation, the work he has developed over the last twenty years shows that he is one of the artists with a more critical view of the contemporary media landscape. In a series of projects, he offers the viewers of his work some of the most ironic and disenchanted images on the forms – architectural, spatial planning – that a certain ideal of progress has brought to our country in recent decades. Determined to alert the visitors of his exhibitions to the state of apathy in which we consume images today, the artist believes that studied inclusion of dissonant or disturbing elements in an apparently clear regime as is photography can lead the spectator to a state of distrust that results in active contemplation.