WE ARE ALL DUCKS WANTING TO BE HORSES

Solo show at Casa da Cerca
Curated by Filipa Oliveira, 2020

"Proganó naturally attempts to bring on provocation inside the institution (not for it to collapse but rather to shake it from within). Not in an uncommitted or unwitting manner, though her work can becharacterised by a certain merry naivety or a non-restraint in how it constructs image-discourse.  There lies its strength, too. For Adriana’s gesture is above all realised in a space of freedom of making, thinking, and saying, without measuring the most lateralisable or superficial consequences nor what does not directly proceed from her work. It is by situating herself right there, and by right there generating her ethics, that the artist will be able to contribute, as an example of what disagrees with her, so that, paraphrasing one of the canvas she now presents, no beautiful horse needs to have an abortion to pursue an artistic career—even if that horse is actually a duck. And in order to show, while being an example of it, that this duck, like Cicciolina, and paraphrasing another canvas, can take a wee where it pleases. (...) Who, after all—with nothing pressuring her to be anything but herself—can be a duck, a horse, a duck-horse. Or none of that at all: something else. It is therefore that this exhibition is also constituted as a proposal: a form of manifesto for the possibilities of formation of contemporary subjectivity—a sensitive, feminist, queer, posthuman one."
- Fragment of the David Réves text for Contemporânea Magazine