EXHIBITIONS
Solo Exhibition, LACS | Sentimental Journey. Cascais/Portugal, 2025
“For three years, the swans of the Seine became silent companions to Emilia in her journey through grief, motherhood, and adaptation. Moving through personal challenges, she found in these birds a metaphor for her own path: imposing yet vulnerable beings, floating between solidity and flow. Each day, the swans’ movements along the river traced a spontaneous choreography—at times elegant, at times disconcerting—echoing the imperfection of existence.
Captured in black and white through multiple exposures, the images deconstruct the idealization of swans as icons of absolute grace. Some photographs reveal moments of torsion and disorder, emphasizing that beauty also resides in asymmetry and inconstancy. The diffuse aesthetic of the photographs translates the artist’s perception during a period in which she navigated between inner and outer worlds.
Brought from Denmark and Sweden by Louis XIV, who wished to admire the animals in his Paris, the descendants of those swans remain on the island that bears their name as a testament to permanence and transformation. Moving between contemplation and affection, Sentimental Journey emerges from a personal and meditative gaze and invites us to recognize the divine within the ordinary. Here, photography becomes an act of devotion to the passage of time and to the beauty of the everyday.”
Luiza Testa, curator
Group Exhibition, BNP Paribas | Memory, identity and Territory. São Paulo/Brazil, 2025
Memory, Identity and Territory
“Between the intimate and the collective, between the lived and the imagined place, memory—of a mutable nature—and individual as well as shared identity construct territories that transcend geography, unfolding into spaces of belonging, affection, and narrative. The exhibition Memory, Identity, and Territory brings together works by Emilia Brandão Carneiro and Gabriela Stragliotto who, within their poetic universes, reveal different ways of inhabiting and inscribing the world. In this encounter, we are invited to revisit places, reimagine stories, and recognize memory as a vital force in the weaving of both the individual and the collective, challenging us to occupy territories in constant transformation.
In the photographs of Emilia Brandão Carneiro, territory emerges as an extension of sensibility. In Sentimental Journey (2016–2019), swans glide across the waters of the River Seine, near the Île de la Jatte in Paris. Wrapped in mist and silence, their suspended bodies condense the poetics of the interval that runs through her work: that which does not settle, yet endures. The use of black-and-white film, multiple exposures, and medium format accentuates this aesthetic of suspension, where time expands and memory settles in subtle layers. More than records, her images are pauses—fragments that reveal invisible affections between space and experience.
This contemplative gaze also manifests in Berni (2020–2022), which follows the final days of a professional show-jumping horse retired between Portugal and France. The animal body, at the end of its cycle, merges with the landscape in ritual silence. In Performance of a Dream (2018), the forest of Fontainebleau becomes the setting for a filmed and photographed choreography, created in collaboration with Marina Droghetti and Lital Weizman, dissolving boundaries between body, nature, and imagination. In Paris Glacial (2017), a heavy snowfall transforms the city into a deserted and suspended landscape, reinforcing the atmosphere that permeates her entire body of work.
In Gabriela Stragliotto’s works, memory takes on dreamlike and spectral contours. Her paintings, drawings, and installations construct landscapes inhabited by anonymous figures—presences in transit between appearing and disappearing. Born in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul, with experiences in urban centers and a background in art and cinema, the artist develops her own visual lexicon, structured in series that repeat, dissolve, or transform. Her poetics reflect displacement and impermanence as central aspects of identity and contemporary experience.
Memory, Identity, and Territory invites the public to travel these paths between riverbanks, distant cities, and constructed landscapes, recognizing in the traces left by the artists something of themselves: an image, a sensation, a story that also runs through us. By interweaving remembrance, subjectivity, and space, the exhibition reaffirms territory as a symbolic and sensitive field where experiences are inscribed and reconfigured. The works operate as affective cartographies, revealing ways of being in the world—always in transit, always in transformation.”
Nuria Vieira, curator
Group Exhibition, Galeria MOVART | Girls just wanna have fun. Lisbon/Portugal, 2025
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun transforms play into power, laughter into language, and creativity into community. When women create together, they nourish one another’s energy, stories, and dreams. They invent new worlds where beauty, courage, and curiosity intertwine. Collaboration becomes empowerment; the creative act becomes celebration.
The works on view reflect a universe where intuition meets memory, matter meets myth, and emotion meets freedom. From the intimate to the political, from the playful to the profound, each artist adds her unique voice to a collective symphony of female creation. In this space, beauty takes shape through joy, creativity multiplies through connection, and female presence ceases to be the exception and becomes the rule.”
Federica Elena, curator
Solo Exhibition, Galeria Caribé | Acervo Migratório. São Paulo/Brazil, 2025
“To migrate, immigrate, emigrate: so many possible routes have required distinct words to capture the subtleties of movement. Migratory flows transform the world: from the first steps out of Africa to the present day, crossing borders has served as a pretext for wars and has been their consequence, loosens or tightens bonds, fosters cultural change, and reveals our astonishing capacity for adaptation.
If conquering the outside world has always been a human constant, in the twentieth century Freud introduced a vector inward: the unconscious. In Migratory Archive, these two movements coexist. One pulses outward into the world; the other travels through introspection—the act of migrating within oneself.
The exhibition brings together distinct photographic series, united by the displacement between interior and exterior. The horse Berni readapts to wild life after years in sport, contrasting with the swans that Louis XIV ordered brought from Scandinavia to Paris. In the same city, Emilia documented the meeting of spring and winter in Japanese cherry trees (When Winter Met Spring) and an exceptionally long winter (Paris Glacial). A ballerina spins in pirouettes and travels the world, seeking to integrate into her surroundings in a Pas de Deux with the photographer, who moves between city and nature, between self and other in Performance of a Dream and Study of the Sun.
The works presented here form a map reflecting both geographical directions and inner journeys. In Migratory Archive, migrating is not merely changing place, but reorganizing memories and transforming realities, in a movement that crosses physical borders as well as the boundaries of consciousness itself, reinforcing the certainty that without displacement, there is no transformation.”
Luiza Testa, curator
Solo Exhibition, Galeria F&deO | Sentimental Journey. Madrid, 2022
“Sentimental Journey presents a series of black-and-white photographs portraying swans on the Seine, in Paris. It may sound a bit cliché, but that is precisely what makes this project fascinating. There are images that reveal something different from what we might expect: a swan twisting, looking unattractive, somewhat disturbed, challenging the conventional image we associate with these graceful birds. We also recognize, of course, the “Brandão signature”: the usual tenderness and generosity in her gaze (which may have been what caught the attention of the PhotoVogue curators, who awarded four images from the series).
Overall, in this exhibition, this Brazilian artist who has adopted Madrid as her home conveys a sense of familiarity. It feels like attending a concert by a musician or composer we know well. Watching a ballet, a play, or a film for the tenth time. Being with close and intimate people. Eating ordinary food. In the past, we might have used the term “classic,” meaning “very typical,” familiar. Some might say it is boring, but the familiar is what grounds us, what comforts us. In a world obsessed with novelty, Brandão presents images that find their value in the representation of what we already know.
The subject and technique may appear ordinary, common, yet the result is romantic, charming, special. With Sentimental Journey, Brandão invites us to recalibrate our values. Her work suggests that what is special does not lie in the new, but in the familiar. The artist chooses reflection and introspection over distraction. And in doing so, she gifts us images that allow us to dream.”
Ana Araújo, curator
Solo Exhibition, LEICA Gallery | Time to Heal. Madrid, 2020
““Time to Heal” is a tribute to healthcare professionals who stand on the front lines against an invisible enemy. Created during March and April 2020 in hospitals across Madrid, 150 professionals joined this personal project by photographer Emilia Brandão (São Paulo, Brazil, 1982).
“In mid-March in Madrid, my adopted city, my life—like that of the rest of humanity—changed radically due to the emergence of the COVID-19 virus. While confined at home with my family, I felt an urgent need to help and to portray those fighting the virus on the front lines, the so-called heroes.”
The aim of this project is to portray hospital teams from all departments across Madrid’s hospitals, who are fighting and sacrificing their lives to save and heal thousands of people from COVID-19. An example of courage and humanity in the face of the health crisis we are experiencing, it offers a process of social healing and reminds us that only united will we be able to overcome this pandemic.
To produce “Time to Heal,” a photographic studio was installed for several days inside each hospital. In each case, a call was announced, and the professionals who wished to participate visited the studio during their breaks throughout their work shifts.
“While they worked long days and hours without rest, in constant action, without time or energy to process everything they were experiencing internally, I offered them a pause—a chair under my light—to meet them and listen to how they felt. By inviting them into a moment of calm and introspection, many connected with their emotions for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic. Far from the heroic image they carried, I was able to witness up close the vulnerable nature of these human beings, distinguished by their duty to heal and care.”
“I believe a portrait holds the power of an applause, and I felt they needed this recognition. I wanted to give them faces and names, to create memories for some of those who experienced the fight against the virus firsthand. I trusted in the classical power of photography to generate value over time, so that they could look back at these images and keep them as a reminder of what they lived through, and so that the portraits would stand as their marks, forever etched in this historic global moment.”
Thanks to the support of three Madrid hospitals—Universitario Puerta del Hierro Majadahonda, Gregorio Marañón, and Universitario del Sureste—which opened their doors, “Time to Heal” is now a reality.”
Emilia Brandão Carneiro, artist
Solo Exhibition, Casa de la Imagen | Time to Heal. Logroño, 2021
Group Exhibition, Galeria F&deO | Catalogue. Madrid, 2022
Group Exhibition, RE|Space | South.Southwest. Berlin, 2020
The works from the South.Southwest collection exhibited at re|space gallery in Berlin are a curated visual insight into Latin American identity. The visual palette is as diverse as the Latin American people, portraying culture, nature, folklore and the everyday. This fine art photography collection has been compiled by the artists Sebastián Liste, Christina de Middel, Álvaro Ybarra Zavala, Laura León, Jesús Rocandio, Adriana Zehbrauskas, Stephen Ferry, Tomás Munita and Emilia Brandão to showcase the strength of contemporary Latin American photography. As photographers, the artists are under the patronage of Leica Iberia, have worked extensively with world-renowned photography agencies such as Magnum and Getty Images, are represented in established fine-art collections such as the New York Metropolitan Museum and have been published in major international publications such as Time Magazine. Though partially stemming from documentary photography projects, the works within this collection have been chosen for their distinct artistic value. What distinguishes this collection from documentary photography is the artistic approach. It is not only the subject of the photographs that begs for a fine art context, but likewise the style and composition. The large scale of many of the works, mounted and framed demand the attention of the viewer much like a history painting. Similarly, the smaller diptychs reference modes of display common in national galleries. Each work contributes to the visual narrative that is the South.Southwest collection. Sometimes atmospheric, sometimes poetic, sometimes biographical the works document and celebrate a contemporary Latin American view on life. What makes this photography collection so unique, is the fact that each of the works is a single-edition print with an unquestionable provenance. This is guaranteed by a four-part identification process involving the certification through Leica, the photographer, the gallery and the buyer. The buyer gains the exclusive rights to a work that will enhance any photography collection. Through their patronage, the collector becomes a key player in the conservation and future of the ever-growing South.Southwest collection. The exhibition is shown exclusively at re|space gallery in Berlin marks the inaugural showing of the collection world-wide. With the objective of bringing contemporary Latin American photography to a wider audience, the exhibition hosted in Berlin, home to people from about 190 nations, allows the works to be seen first-hand by art and photography enthusiasts from around the world. Not only does this widen the reach of the photography collection itself but also the cultural exchange between Latin America and the rest of the world. The works from the South.Southwest collection chosen for this exhibition share a deep connection to life in Latin America. While this is the first time the works of the South.Southwest collection are exhibited publically, the collection is ever-growing and thus each work becomes part of its legacy.
Group Exhibition, Galerie Huit – British Journal of Photography | OpenWalls Arles. Arles, 2023
