“This strange place where I carry everyone and their entire history” (in Green Scream, film by Nádia Duvall)

Nádia Duvall is a contemporary artist whose works delve deeply into the complexities of identity, memory and space. Her body of work draws from her biography and often explores themes of the construction of subjectivity through performance, installation, film, sculpture and drawing, which evoke renewed introspection.

In her most recent performance I AM NO ONE (2024), Duvall takes the audience at the Giardini at the Venice Biennale into a territory of curiosity and reflection, where the boundary between being and physical space is constantly questioned.

The performance features Duvall pulling a set of suitcases along a gravel path - built by invaders in the city of Venice - that leads to the central pavilion, symbolizing the burden of the histories of the national pavilions and the collective memories of the artists who have exhibited/exhibit their work at the biennale. The body of the empty suitcases is marked with the title of the work I AM NO ONE. It thus becomes visible in this practice [Grosz, 1994], emerging from a political field of institutionalized power relations [Foucault, 1975]. At the same time, each suitcase becomes an extension of her own body. This relational performative act [Haraway, 1985] of transgression and transformation [Kristeva, 1980] resonates with the notion of being a migrant, and being nobody, in a space inhabited by others, creating an atmosphere of restlessness and resistance [Butler, 1990].

Born in Alicante, Spain, of Portuguese-Algerian origin, for Duvall identity and body are inseparable. Her country is the world [Woolf, 1938]. She frees herself from the ties of nationality and connects with the layers of personal histories, experiences and memories that are constantly changing [Bhabha, 1994]. She dedicates this performance to refugee women who cross borders. She takes with her the essence of multiple invented personalities, reflecting on her sixteen heteronyms and the fragmentation of bodily identity. I AM NO ONE thus becomes a poetic and visceral exploration of the boundaries between the self and the other, between space and absence.

Biography

Nádia Duvall, born in 1986 in Alicante (Spain) but of Portuguese-Algerian origin, is an artist and researcher whose work reflects multiple auto-biographical, social and political issues with profound philosophical reflections through the use of multiple media, such as sculpture, painting, video, performance, literature and cinema. Duvall holds a PhD in Fine Arts (2024) from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Lisbon, University of Lisbon, with the prestigious scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the final classification of Summa Cum Laude (distinction and praise). The artist investigates mythology, war and the fragmentation and demultiplication of the personality as a symptom of our contemporaneity, which she calls "EPILEPTIC MACHINES". Duvall has received several awards such as the BANIF Painting Revelation Award (2008), the Art, Science and Technology Award/Bursary for his innovative technique of making Skin Paintings inside swimming pools, the Young Creators Award from Portugal's National Culture Center (2016), the Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Museum's Young European Creation Award (2019), the FCT Doctoral Scholarship from the Foundation for Science and Technology (2019-2023) and the Luxembourg Art Prize Merit (2022). Duvall has published several books and participates in various international conferences. The artist is currently represented by FOCO Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal.