The exhibition includes an installation of Macedo’s 2022 film of the same title alongside a selection of photographic images from the artist’s "Silent Walls" series (2022–2023). Both bodies of work expand from Macedo’s internationally acclaimed project "Seems So Long Ago Nancy", in which the artist filmed and recorded the invigilation staff situated within the exhibition rooms of Tate Modern and Tate Britain over a three-month period in 2012. Given this particular institutional framework, in both series inevitable questions regarding structural hierarchy, conditions of labor and the politics of public and private space arise.

However, despite these palpable concerns, at the core of both series lies a more imperceptible set of preoccupations. There is, for instance, an ongoing and paradoxical interplay between the observer and observed, what is visibly displayed and what is left indecipherable. The figures are caught in a fragile space between bodily fixity and involuntary movement. In a series of intimate views, Macedo examines, through "an intricate choreography of small gestures", the means by which often impenetrable internal spaces of reflection or imagination can be verbalized through minimal repetitive actions. The flickering of an eye, the tremor of a finger, the nervous intertwining of a pair of restless hands. In "Silent Walls", this sequence of spontaneous gestures is magnified and reframed to accrue new meaning. The haptic memory of overlooked quiet movements is elevated, at once poetic and grotesque.

Through their painterly and hazy materiality, the images echo the subject’s bodies, operating in a fluid and transitional space which blurs the boundaries between internal and external states. In "The Pianist", the subject’s hands unsettlingly shift between positions of control – the automatic handing out of tickets and the swift turning of pages from an over read catalogue – to the obstinacy of the improvised – fingers dancing to the beat of a soundless tune. The institutional structures such as catalogues and blurred name badges become almost redundant props in an internalized private performance. A site of bodily resistance adjacent to the public exhibition setting in which it is staged. These disjunctured moments of quiet humanity spill out and serve to deconstruct the institutional constructions which they operate within.

Tatiana Macedo (* 1981, Lisbon) of Portuguese and Angolan descent grew up in Lisbon and moved to London when she was 20 years old. Since then she has been living and working in different periods of time between Lisbon, London and Berlin, though her practice has taken her to different parts of the world. This has led her to confront and learn from experiences of alterity and cultural difference, as well as globalization. The notion of “border thinking” is expressed in the artist’s practice via her thinking critically and philosophically in social, cultural and historical webs but also in processes that entail media intersections and an exercise of self-reflexivity. If something could unite the apparent “disparity” of Macedo’s oeuvre, it would be the fact that she “has been there” as a witness reflecting on her own perception and knowledge, creating an image of reality that becomes a reality of the image (in the broader sense of the image concept, fiction and non-fiction).Her process of thinking and doing expands as an essay language that shapes her transmedia work, installations and writing, and invokes processes of montage and choreography. Under an existentialist perspective it departs from a circumscribed experience of a place and its embodiment, to a continuous experience of “expansion and fall”- a concept the artist has been constructing and writing on.

Macedo holds a Fine Arts Degree from Central St. Martins College of Art & Design (London 2004) and an MA in Visual Anthropology FCSH - UNL (Lisbon 2012). She won the 1st edition of the Sonae Media Art Award (2015). Grants include artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien International Studio Programme (Berlin 2016). Her first film, “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy” (2012) shot at Tate Britain and Tate Modern was awarded the SAW Film Prize (American Anthropological Association – Washington D.C.2014). It was exhibited at International Film Festivals and Film Screenings in Museums and Galleries including Tate Britain (2012, 2013), the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Video Programme (Amsterdam 2012) and Tegenboschvanvreden Gallery (Amsterdam 2014). Solo shows (selected): DIDAC Fundacion DARDO (Galiza), Nuno Centeno Gallery (Porto), CAV-Centro de Artes Visuais (Coimbra), Appleton Square (Lisbon) Trienal de Arquitectura (Lisbon), Carlos Carvalho Contemporary Art (Lisbon), Culturgest (Porto), Kunstraum Botschaft, (Berlin), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Tegenboschvanvreden (Amsterdam), MNAC-National Museum of Contemporary Art (Lisbon). Group Shows (selected): MAAT Museum of Art , Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), Jeju Biennial of Contemporary Art , (South Korea), Iwalewahaus (Bayreuth), Rohkunstbau XXIII (Brandenburg), Tegenboschvanvreden (Amsterdam), Manifesta Headquarters (Amsterdam), Paris Photo, Photo Basel, Arco Madrid, Art Rotterdam, Galeria Zé dos Bois (Lisbon), Caixa Cultural do Rio de Janeiro, Modern Art Centre - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon). Her work is represented in various public and private collections such as CACE - The Portuguese State Contemporary Art Collection, EDP-MAAT Foundation, Maria and Armando Cabral, MACAM, Lisbon Municipality, Marin Gaspar, OTAZU Video Collection and Maria Jose Roblan.