CCB Museum of Contemporary Art, Lisbon

Due to the celebrations for International Museum Day, which happened to fall on a Monday this year, a large number of national museums decided to mark the occasion by offering free admission to the general public over the preceding weekend.

I decided to take advantage of the opportunity and visit a museum I hadn’t been to since 2010. The last time I’d been there, it was still called the Berardo Collection Museum. Located in a prime riverside area in the parish of Belém, this museum—part of the Belém Cultural Center—has always been a major attraction for anyone visiting the area.

I’ve mentioned the Belém Cultural Center to you several times before, and its importance in the cultural and recreational development of the population, offering many music, ballet, opera, film, and theater performances, as well as exhibitions by local and international artists, artisans, and both traveling and permanent exhibitions. It also has a convention center that is used for various events—not only cultural ones but spanning a wide range of fields—and often serves as the venue for diplomatic meetings and conferences.

With over 1,400 seats, the grand auditorium—which opened in 1992—has since been a vital hub for cultural exchange and development.

On May 17, I went to visit the contemporary art exhibition. This museum is listed among the 150 most-visited museums worldwide by "The Art Newspaper", and there’s a reason for that.

It is spread across three separate floors, accessible by elevators or stairs. I always prefer to take the stairs; not only do I get some exercise, but I also end up noticing more details, such as the architectural features of this spiral staircase that leads to the upper floor.

Upon reaching the upper floor, we are immediately greeted by an exhibition by José Pedro Croft, which encourages us to view the world and objects as part of a reality that ultimately shapes us and also alters the way we see and perceive the world.

The combination of shapes, shades, overlays, and plays of light brings a true breath of fresh air to her pieces, revealing vanishing points and perspectives different from those we’re used to seeing in our daily lives.

An inverted nest, shaped like a lamp, in which the suspended “eggs”—some of which are illuminated, creating a fantastic effect—hover over a scattering of small shards from eggs that have broken. We feel strangely unsettled. It seems as though something went wrong earlier in that room; we immediately think an accident occurred—that a child, or someone more careless, knocked over one of the “eggs”—but we realize that this is precisely the reaction the artist is seeking from us: a sense of unease, a feeling of fragility surrounding something that hangs in the air. The irreversibility of certain acts that leads to the destruction of something as fragile as nature.

We then move on to an exhibition called “Multiple Eyes”, which takes us through various aspects of contemporary art, and where we are confronted, challenged, and even almost compelled to interact with the artwork in order to find the answer we seek, as happens in one particular piece, in which an embroidered rug is placed on a small stage—or platform—with a mirror fixed to the ceiling above it. The image we see is of each of us side by side with the other person sharing that rug with us, searching for something within ourselves or in the other that has placed us in that position. Certainly, curiosity was one of the starting points that led us there and caused us to find ourselves in that way. A statue of a woman in shades of cyan, as if levitating, points out to each of us a possible solution or starting point for the answer we seek.

Does the answer to the problems each and every one of us faces today lie within us, humanity? I believe it does!

In the end, the shock of a true horror movie. A sculpture of an adult, over 3 meters tall, swallowing a baby by the head. We are led to wonder if this isn’t, in fact, exactly what is happening right now. A world in which the rights of those who are still children—and of those not yet born—are not merely suppressed. Is humanity jeopardizing the healthy future of coming generations? Are we doing what’s necessary to leave this world better than we found it, or are we merely depleting finite natural resources and producing ever-increasing amounts of waste and nearly irreversible environmental changes?

Another staircase leads us to the lower level, where we can access the museum’s exterior.

Certainly, what I saw made me look at some things differently—some in a more creative way, others in a more pragmatic way. What matters is that a visit to this museum transformed a Sunday afternoon that was just like so many others into something different. I hope it won’t be as many years before my next visit as it has been since my last one.

I hope you enjoyed this post of mine, and that I’ve managed to spark your interest in visiting this museum should you ever come to Lisbon!

I hope you enjoyed my FIRST post here in the Museum Community!

Bem Hajam 🍀

^{Photographed with Samsung A26 by @xrayman in 2026, May 17
Photographic edition with PhotoScape X
Original text in Portuguese written by @xrayman, translated with DeepL.com
Sources for this post: https://www.ccb.pt/sobreoccb/}