Exhibition The Unruly Horizon – Resonances Between the Sacred and Time

Included in the programme of the Portuguese Capital of Culture 2026, The Unruly Horizon – Resonances Between the Sacred and Time brings together pieces from the art collection of the Ponta Delgada City Council, spanning the 17th to the 21st centuries. The exhibition proposes a critical reading of the image and its historical journey, without following a linear chronological order, in order to highlight continuities, ruptures and overlaps between eras, languages and contexts.

Organized into five sections — Order of the Visible, The Face in Crisis, Body of the Image, In Long Time and Matter in Combustion —, the exhibition traces the transformation of representation: from the sacred that orders the gaze to the fragmentation of identity, from the physical presence of matter to the thickness of historical time and the present as a space of tension. An 18th-century bronze bell serves as the symbolic axis of this reading, articulating permanence and duration.

The exhibition invites visitors to see the image as an open field of thought, where time is not only the past, but active material for new interpretations and questions.