Complexo Brasil at Gulbenkian: Where Beauty Refuses to Hide the Fire Beneath
A blockbuster show that refuses to let Portugal keep pretending Brazil is just colour, rhythm and saudade.
There are exhibitions that decorate a museum, and there are exhibitions that haunt it. Complexo Brasil — now open at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian — does the latter. Spread across two vast galleries, this is not a “Brazilian art show” in the postcard sense. It is a radiography. A nervous system. A refusal to pretend that Brazil, or Portugal, or the space between the two, can ever be told in a single line.
Curated by José Miguel Wisnik, Milena Britto and Guilherme Wisnik, the show feels less like an exhibition and more like a weather system moving through the museum: humid, noisy, contradictory, alive. Gulbenkian’s white-cube civility is briefly disrupted by what the curators call “a journey of experiences” — an attempt to make visitors feel the cultural, historical and emotional forces that have shaped Brazil and, by extension, the entire Lusophone world.
That journey is not comfortable. It isn’t meant to be.
You move from Indigenous cosmologies to Afro-Brazilian resistances, from Amazonian soundscapes to urban collisions of migration, inequality and invention. One room envelops you in layered audio — river, forest, voices — inviting you into a Brazilian sensory universe that institutions usually sterilise. Another wall erupts into a chaotic collage of faces, masks, archives, bodies, as if the country were making its own counter-atlas.
If Portuguese audiences expect a soft-focus celebration of “Brazilian creativity”, this exhibition denies them the fantasy.
Instead, it stages the entanglement: the colonial past Portugal rarely confronts, the diasporic present it struggles to fully embrace, the shared cultural bloodstream linking Lisbon to Belém, Bahia and the Sertão. Complexo Brasil treats history not as a polite conversation but as a tension that must finally be spoken aloud.
Still, there is also joy — not the shallow joy of exoticism, but the profound joy that survives despite everything. Oiticica’s colours, Indigenous textures, contemporary gestures of reinvention: they pulse through the space like ruptures, reminding you that culture is not a museum object but a combustion engine.
If you live in Portugal — especially now, in a moment of rising xenophobia and lazy nostalgia — Complexo Brasil is more than an exhibition. It’s a reality check. A mirror that doesn’t flatter. A reminder that Lusophone connections are built on pain, creativity, conflict, tenderness, and the relentless survival of those who were never invited to write the official narrative.
Go. Take your time. Let it complicate you.
