In modernity, the change of paradigm towards the moving image has been hailed as one of the most determinant fields for the definition of new interpretations of its use value.
The issues with cinema, and particularly with television, which were more acute than with photography, where the argument was about inscribing its procedures in the artistic sphere, were extended to areas that define the social and political transformation of the universes approached by them. That is, the time of image is now the image of time.
The popular expression “a picture is worth a thousand words” has won, currently, a resonance that borders on cynicism. The discredit of the word is the discredit of narrative, and of vital content. What seems to determine our age is a type of belief in the transparency of the image, as if its excessive voracity hadn’t effectively caused the opposite effect, that is, a general numbness of the receiver’s critical ability.
If on the one hand the commercialisation of image through its most powerful channels, such as advertising and entertainment, make its value one of the areas of greatest financial speculation of our time, on the other, the democratisation of its use doesn’t seem to have brought (except residually) new forms of understanding the world: we could say that we all film the same things in the same way. So, we go back to the modern question: it is in the more or less established field of what is conventionally called art that we find different approaches to the globalised magma of a harsh capitalism that likes to dress itself up with elaborate imagery constructions. And if at the beginnings of modernity the big uncertainty was about image’s ideological exploitation, today the issue seems to have faded into a much more dangerous point which is precisely the non-ideological character of its treatment in favour of a supposed democratic haven that is not anything but compliance to numbers: investment versus audience.
Hugo Olim’s work has been about appropriation of video images in order to deconstruct, decompose, change, pollute and finally reconstruct them through cuts and editing manipulation, besides the induction of technological incidents in its coding. These incidents are vital for the final result because they create marks that are registered as ridges of a time without time on images that are intentionally dated.
More than on the nerve, it is on the skin that this surgeon of the image operates. The choice could have fallen on social or politically over-determined images; however the artist works precisely on anodyne segments of an audiovisual panorama filled with endless fragments of trivialities.
If the original images settle themselves on a narrative and content randomness, the manipulations done by Hugo Olim evoke a general feeling of decadence where the rhythm of editing, the cracks on the image and sound flux, when there, underscore their exhilarating character.
It is therefore, a short-circuited entertainment that we’re talking about. And from the overlaying of narrative disintegrations, meaning could emerge, even if in the context of a negative tautology: caught on the degeneration of image and the audience’s look that cannot but feel confronted with the need to take sides, in the exact measure of how that void is uncomfortable to them.
Maybe this is the big challenge for this young artist: how to go from criticising entertainment from its core, which he has intelligently done in this exhibition, to work that purposely creates visual mechanisms with their own narrative density, even if that narrative is built on a deconstruction of something that pre-existed. This is the expectation that these images have left me with. From its scar, may the tissues of sense regenerate themselves.

Miguel von Hafe Pérez

Hugo Olim

Born in Machico, 1978. Lives and works at Madeira Island.

Studies
2007 – Post-graduation in Cultura Contemporânea e Novas Tecnologias by Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
2003 - Graduated in Multimedia Technologies by Instituto Politécnico do Porto.

Exhibitions
2008
“Meta-mor-fose” photography, Galeria do Convento S. Francisco, ilha do Pico, Açores, Portugal. (group)
2007
“OnOff” video,
India International Centre, New Dehli, Índia; (group)
XIV Bienal de Cerveira, Portugal; (group)
“Links” photography + video,
galeria Lab65, Oporto, Portugal; (solo)
Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal, Portugal; (group)
OkastudioGallery, Oporto, Portugal; (group)
“Orgânicos” photography,
II Bienal do Porto Santo, Porto Santo, Portugal; (group)
“Meta-mor-fose” photography,
Museu de Angra do Heroísmo, Açores, Portugal; (group)
“Sonnenuntergang” photography,
exposição colectiva Quartos Vagos, Funchal, Portugal; (group)
“T0” video installation,
Igreja de São Tiago, Palmela, Portugal. (group)
2006
“Outline” photography
Galeria Lab65, Porto, Portugal, (group)
“Rennacs” scannergraphy,
Museu de Angra do Heroísmo, Angra do Heroísmo, Portugal; (group)
Museu Casa da Luz, Funchal, Portugal; (group)
“Meta-Mor-Fose” photography,
Gran Canaria Espacio Digital, Las Palmas, Spain; (group)
“T0” vídeo instalação,
Galeria Mouraria, Funchal, Portugal; (solo)
“Men VS Machine” video,
Colectiva “What is Watt?”, Fórum da Maia, Maia, Portugal; (group)
Festival de Curtas Metragens de Vila do Conde, Vila do Conde, Portugal; (group)
“OnOff” video,
Festival Art-Ort, Heidelberg, Germany; (group)
Festival Transmediale, Berlim, Germany; (group)
Performance & Intermedia Festival, Szczecin, Poland; (group)
Festival Internacional de Arte Digital Rosário, Santa Fe, Argentina; (group)
Colectiva “What is Watt?”, Fórum da Maia, Maia, Portugal. (group)
2005
“Rennacs” scannergraphy,
Gran Canaria Espacio Digital, Las Palmas, Spain; (group)
Galeria Mouraria, Funchal, Portugal; (group)
Magnólia, Funchal, Portugal; (solo)
“Letargo”, “Men VS Machine”, “Atlantis” videos,
Magnólia, Funchal, Portugal; (solo)
“OnOff” video,
Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal, Funchal, Portugal; (group)
Festival VídeoLisboa, Lisbon, Portugal. (group)
2004
“Fish_Music”, “Y+B”, “TRPTC”, “Drive Me”, Rolling Bags”, “OnOff” videos,
Museu Casa da Luz, Funchal, Portugal; (solo)
“Fish_Music” video,
Festival Némo, Paris, France; (group)

2003
“Flickers” fotography+video,
Festival Ovarvídeo, Ovar, Portugal (solo)
Sentidos Grátis 6.0, Coimbra, Portugal; (group)
Museu Casa das Mudas, Calheta, Portugal; (group)
“Rennacs” scannergrafia,
Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto, Oporto, Portugal; (group)
“Y+B” video,
Festival D'Images Artistiques Vídeo, Palácio da Galeria, Tavira, Portugal. (group)