João Penalva (Lisbon, 1949) began his career in ballet and contemporary dance, having danced with Pina Bausch and Gerhard Bohner companies. After settling in London in 1976, he began a career as a visual artist, using painting, photography, installation and video, frequently combined with text. His work has a powerful fictional, even narrative, component, and constructs worlds of relationships that begin with real, recreated or purely constructed stories.

In 1993, at the Porto Customs House (then in the process of being deactivated), Penalva held his first installation: Arquivos and Café. This was a very important work for his own artistic development and for Portuguese contemporary art, since it achieved a symbiosis in relation to the place that had meanwhile been rendered obsolete and displaced in time.

It was following on this intervention that João Penalva was challenged to intervene in Culturgest Porto, where the memory of its past as a banking institution and the historic nature of its heavily decorated architecture are both still clearly evident. The work that he will develop takes advantage of this doubly historical set of circumstances (both in terms of the institution and his own personal artistic career) to produce a site-specific intervention.