João Maria Gusmão. Following the White Tiger

28.08 – 31.10.2026 João Maria Gusmão. Following the White Tiger

Zachęta – National Gallery of Art

curator: Post Brothers

Following the White Tiger is a solo exhibition by Portuguese artist João Maria Gusmão, comprising a multichannel array of looping 16mm projected works. The exhibition presents the latest results of the artist’s process-based experiments with analogue means and speculative concepts, examining the relationship between history, ideology, and aesthetics and their material correlates.

In a present increasingly dominated by digital images, Gusmão draws attention to the particular qualities of analogue film – its physicality, its technical processes of production, and the traces of light recorded on the film strip. The artist explores the tension between the tangible construction of the image – the photosensitive transparency, projection, and mechanisms of recording – and its symbolic dimension, where images operate as carriers of cultural and ideological meanings. His works reveal the image as both a material object and a site of memory and imagination.

The title of the exhibition is drawn from João Maria Gusmão’s recent work The School of the White Tiger (2024), a sequence of vertical still shots depicting a kung fu dojo in France. Here, the covering up of graffiti on the building’s façade is imagined as a form of abstract painting inspired by movement, gesture, and the animal world.

Gusmão connects this cinematic chance encounter to Mao Zedong, the Chinese leader, and his “paper tiger” parable—an expression used to describe American imperialism and the nuclear threat during the Cold War. The motif becomes a point of departure for reflecting on the tension between the appearance of strength and an underlying fragility, between what is visible and what remains concealed.

In his work, Gusmão emphasizes film as an apparatus of illusion that creates the impression of movement through a succession of still images. His works explore the relationship between the real and its representations, bringing together the realms of the human, the technological, the animal, and the inhuman.

The exhibition brings together a dozen film works, many of which were developed through production residencies with Zachęta. Described by Gusmão as “film sculptures”, these works maintain a spectral and associative logic, creating a space where repetition, gesture, and the materiality of film shape the experience of the image.

Drawing from the everyday, Gusmão subtly addresses a violence embedded in Western imaginaries – both symbolic and material. Through an ironic engagement with a particular form of orientalism, including kung fu, Zen culture, the reception of Mao Zedong’s writings by French intellectuals, and the ways in which the West constructs representations of the East, the artist proposes a poetic “third way” that resists binary oppositions.

Technique – understood both as a routine and as a technological means of creating and manipulating images – becomes, in Gusmão’s work, a way of knowing and revealing the visible and the unseen, uncovering the entanglement between the technical and what extends beyond direct experience.

After this presentation, Following the White Tiger will travel to Portugal, where the project will develop through a special presentation at Sismógrafo, in Porto, and the production of a new artwork made in collaboration with students at the School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa in Porto. In March 2027, the project will culminate in an expanded large-scale exhibition at Museum of Art and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon, and the release of a publication featuring stylized texts written by the artist and curator, expressed through an unorthodox, discursive challenging of the protocols that tether thought to imagery.

This exhibition contains stroboscopic light effects. Visitors with epilepsy or sensitivity to flashing lights are advised to exercise particular caution.