Soft Ground

With works by Laís Amaral, Vasco Futscher, Marcius Galan, João Maria Gusmão, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Anne Lefebvre, Cristiano Lenhardt, Patrícia Leite, Arthur Lescher, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Ernesto Neto, Damián Ortega, Lygia Pape, Santídio Pereira, Rivane Neuenschwander, Paulo Nimer Pjota, Solange Pessoa, Marina Rheingantz, Paula Siebra, Manuella Silveira, Marcos Siqueira, Antonio Társis, Pedro Tudela, Pedro Vaz, Flávia Vieira, Erika Verzutti, and Luiz Zerbini.

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel is pleased to announce Soft Ground, the sixth edition of its annual summer exhibition in Comporta, Portugal, presented for the second consecutive year in collaboration with Mendes Wood DM and, for the first time, with the Portuguese gallery Kubikgallery, from July 4 to September 5, 2026.

This year’s programming  takes place across two venues: the Casa da Cultura da Comporta and the Espaço Museológico Museu do Arroz. The exhibition brings contemporary art into dialogue with the region’s distinct atmosphere, offering a slower, more contemplative mode of engagement. Rooted in openness and dialogue, the initiative reflects the gallery’s collaborative ethos by fostering meaningful partnerships with like-minded institutions.

Set in Comporta’s expansive rice fields and golden dunes, one of the longest uninterrupted beaches in the world and one of Europe’s most significant natural reserves, Soft Ground confronts the compounding pressures now bearing down on the region. Recent seasons of catastrophic weather have made the stakes impossible to ignore: storms eating into the coastline, entire towns submerged by floodwaters, the landscape changing before our eyes with a violence and speed that leaves little room for doubt. “I have witnessed this region transform over the past decades, and these debates have become more pressing than ever,” says Maria Ana Pimenta, partner and international director at Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, and conceiver of the annual project. “We are interested in bringing to Comporta a compelling visual and material experience, while opening a dialogue around issues central to this region and deeply connected to the practices of our artists.” It was this sense of accelerating crisis that crystallised the exhibition’s urgency for its organisers. “The changes we are witnessing are not only ecological but social and political, and we felt this had to be addressed now, through art,” says Carolyn Drake Kandiyoti, Partner at Mendes Wood DM. “Climate crisis and real estate speculation are no longer abstract forces here; they are physically reshaping the land and the lives of those who inhabit it.”

Across various media the artists attend closely to this moment of transition. Rather than elegies for what has been lost, the works ask what comes next, and whether there is still time to shape it. Soft Ground is presented across two spaces by three galleries whose collaboration reflects a shared conviction that the moment calls for a collective response, an artistic exchange that extends beyond traditional exhibition models. Kubik Gallery has been present in Comporta for two consecutive summers, deepening its engagement with the region and its community. “Joining forces with Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Mendes Wood DM for Soft Ground allows us to create something with real reach,” says João Azinheiro, Director of Kubik Gallery. “An exhibition that speaks to the region as a whole and to the scale of what is at stake.” Together, the three galleries open an urgent dialogue between fragile gestures of care and preservation and the ecological, social, and political forces threatening to overwhelm them.

A critical essay by curator and writer Filipa Ramos will accompany the exhibition. Ramos is one of the most significant voices working at the intersection of art, ecology, and moving image, known for her rigorous engagement with questions of multispecies coexistence, environmental fragility, and the politics of landscape. Her text will offer a critical framework for the questions the exhibition raises, about land, transformation, and the forms of attention and care we must still choose to practice.