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1911-1999 O ensino mdico em Lisboa no incio do sculo: Sete artistas contemporneos evocam a gerao mdica de 1911/ Medical teaching in Lisbon in the early 20th century: seven contemporary artists evoke the generation of 1911. Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa.

Manuel Valente Alves is an artist and a doctor. Committed to interdisciplinarity, he has made something of a vocation of bringing together these two disparate areas of endeavour and research. His starting point for this exhibition is the notion that postmodernity is characterised by the dissolution of boundaries between the discreet areas of study outlined during the Enlightenment, Valente Alves has fervently fostered dialogue between the disciplines of art and medicine, in ways that offer a synthesis of the two disciplines, without either of them losing its particular identity. The Allegorical Impulse the series of debates that he earlier organised for the Order of Doctors, brought together theoreticians and practitioners from both of these areas. The launch of the present exhibition was timed to accompany the opening of the 9th National Congress of Medical Education at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon. Rather than opting for the standard documentary exhibition, Valente Alves invited seven contemporary artists to produce original works of art inspired by the lives and works of seven doctors around 1911 (catalogue). While medicine in Portugal was mostly academic prior to 1911, Valente Alves tells us with the founding of the School of Medicine in Lisbon in 1911, an era of medical research was inaugurated, its outcomes keeping apace with those of advanced centres such as London, Paris and Berlin. From this period, seven doctors were selected and each allocated to a single artist; seven writers were invited to produce texts accompanying the work of each artist, in a handsome and highly informative publication that also includes twenty six texts by some of the most important figures from the Faculty of Medicine in Lisbon. This is an ambitious enterprise. While often, works produced to a particular iconographic brief tend towards the programmatic or illustrative, the result here is, for the most part, surprisingly tangential. The artists, who represent several generations (dates of birth range from 1934 to 1972) as well as practices, all responded to the challenge energetically with detailed research, fashioning the particularities of each of the medical personalities in accordance with a their own artistic trajectory and body of work: no easy task.

Several of the artists deal with the notion of the body as an articulated whole, exploring the interplay between interior and exterior, metaphorically, between body and world (Helena Almeida, Jos Pedro Croft, Miguel Palma, No Sendas). Cristina Mateus focuses on the fact that her doctor (Slvio Rebello) was also a poet. ngela Ferreiras work is centred around the research of Anbal Bettencourt, a pioneer in the study of bilharzia, a parasitic disease transmissible in water. Bettencourt was also one of the people responsible for the founding of the Portuguese Photographic Association. Deploying the rigorous conceptual strategies that have come to characterise her work in recent years, Ferreira splices together photographic images taken by the doctor women laundering clothes in river water with images from Chianca de Garcias celebrated film A Aldeia da Roupa Branca (village of white linen), made in 1939. In the film, the image of the regime is, quite literally, cleaned up: it bolstered the Salazarist myth of a robust, pure and rural nationhood, represented by spanking clean laundry. Helena Almeidas noteworthy series of photographs titled Dentro de Mim (inside me) shows her own body in various prone positions, in an architectural space scraped and expunged of anything extraneous. Jos Predro Crofts untitled sculpture is among the artists best work ever. A structure made of metal and mirrors, the piece boasts the clean lines and pared down aspect of minimalist sculpture. However, the repeated presence of reflective surfaces draws the spectator into a game of surfaces in which interior and exterior represent each other, a succinct metaphor for the human body itself. Ruth Rosengarten 1911-1999 O ensino mdico em Lisboa no incio do sculo: Sete artistas contemporneos evocam a gerao mdica de 1911/ Medical teaching in Lisbon in the early 20th century: seven contemporary artists evoke the generation of 1911. Fundao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisboa. Published in Viso, 25 February, 1999.