🔎 🏛️ 🔎 🏛️ WE VISIT EXHIBITIONS SO THAT YOU HAVE TO 🔎 🏛️ 🔎 🏛️ AND WE TALK ABOUT IT                                  

About

About Me

Joana P. R. Neves

I launched Exhibitionistas to bring art into wider spaces of conversation. Art is life, and life, at times, can be art. It's funny how simple expressions can be so wise: "life imitating art" is a little nugget of complexity. It shows how interwoven life and art are, but also how dynamic their kinship is. Art is so present in our environment that we overlook it. But imagine your interior painted completely black. Your mood would be irreversibly affected. Nothing to do but to change the colour of the walls. Now extend this to all the amazing images that surround you–the sculptures, the engineered life we live with designed implements, words endlessly rearranged to be sung. Art is everywhere, even in organic and mineral things. Earth sculpts mountains, the wind draws rivulets with air and water. The world, as Charles Baudelaire wrote, is a forest of symbols, observing you with a familiar gaze.  

Joana, inspired by Katrin Ströbel's wall drawing in the exhibition she curated of her work and Boryana Petkova's at Frac Amiens in 2023. The mural was drawn on the wall by the artist. Boryana Petkova also drew a sort of trail of graphite on the wall as well, that you can see on the upper-left corner of the wall, above the entrance of the exhibition space.

If you have to know...


Joana is an independent writer and curator, and artistic director of Drawing Now Paris since 2018. She has been an artist assistant, and art critic, a video curator, a commercial gallery director, and has curated numerous exhibitions. Amongst her proudest curatorial achievements are: the touring exhibition of Irma Blank (co-curated with Johana Carrier), working with Inci Eviner on a solo presentation of her work at MCA Amiens in 2023, and Isabelle Ferreira's solo show at MAAT Lisbon in 2025-26. She co-launched Worlding, an art and residency space in London, with Diogo Pimentão in 2021, and her pride and joy, the podcast Exhibitionistas, in 2024. 

Ok, one last thing!

Joana has always been an avid consumer of podcasts. She often says that having her own show has made her a better writer. This strange format of intense audio experiences (and video) has, indeed,  led to a re-discovery, from the inside, of the potential that social media also has; it can be a collective force for art, and knowledge in general. So, she recently launched her "Visit with Me" series on Instagram, which bring together a written and fun short text and the immediacy of the smartphone video. Take that literacy doomsayers! Social media can favour writing and wordsmithing if someone puts in the effort. To empower you, she also dedicated episodes of the podcast to "digital hygiene". So, she is slowly dropping exclusive YouTube material for the Exhibitionistas YT channel. There is a lot of good stuff out there, you just have to dig up a little; the tech bros are not inclined to favour smart people. 

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