Driven by the question ‘Who invented art history?’, Rita GT pursued her arts education in Porto and later moved to Berlin to explore the roots of Eurocentric thought. In her blog from September 2008, she reflected on her awareness of being shaped by Eurocentric perspectives and her appreciation for the weight of European art. Her evolving answer to this question became part of her artistic practice, documented in performances like Performance in Eurocentric Museum (2009) and her later works, such as Fall, Action nº 1 (2013) in Luanda. By 2015, she had also become the producer of the Angola Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

Furthering her studies in Sweden, she delved into postcolonial studies and connected the invention of art history to the creation of museums in the 19th century. She highlighted how colonial ethnographers brought artifacts to the West, shaping Western ideas about the ‘Other’ through vague and reconstructed notions of exoticism and ritual—a theme central to her artistic statement.

Source: Select