Parto Sem Dor/ Notes on Portuguese-ness

About The Exhibition

Parto Sem Dor/ Notes on Portuguese-ness is a solo exhibition by Portuguese photographer and visual artist Rita Pena, exploring the construction of national identity through family histories, personal memory and Portugal's political and colonial past.

Beginning with the grief of her grandmother and her own complex relationship with her family and country, Pena examines how national ideals are transmitted across generations, shaping both intimate relationships and collective understandings of belonging. The project considers the enduring legacy of Portugal’s Estado Novo, whose ideological principles of Deus, Pátria, Família (God, Fatherland, Family) continue to reverberate through personal and social life.

Moving between fact and fiction, memory and history, Pena combines family photographs and correspondence with archival documents, portraits, still lifes, landscapes and digital manipulations. These fragmented, dreamlike compositions reveal how political ideologies become embedded in everyday experience, often persisting beyond conscious recognition.

The project also turns towards Portugal’s colonial history and the systems of thought through which national identity has been constructed and maintained. Through a collaborative strand developed with migrants living in the East Midlands whose histories are connected to Portugal through colonialism, trade and other historical encounters, Pena explores alternative ways of understanding Portuguese-ness. Drawing on personal experiences, myths and stories, this work seeks to create an ecology of knowledges that brings different ways of knowing into dialogue.

Bringing personal introspection into dialogue with collective histories and lived experiences, Parto Sem Dor/ Notes on Portuguese-ness asks how national identities are inherited, whose knowledge shapes them, and how their histories might be understood differently.

About The Artist - Rita Pena

Rita Pena is a Portuguese photographer and visual artist based in Nottingham, whose practice explores relationships between place, identity, memory and socio-political narratives through lens-based storytelling. Her work frequently engages with community contexts and examines how environments and cultural histories shape collective and personal identities. She develops projects through collaborative research, often combining documentary, conceptual and participatory photographic approaches.

Rita has previously worked on The Meadows, a collaborative and community-embedded project documenting neighbourhood transformation and collective histories, demonstrating her ability to engage with socially complex environments through visual storytelling. She is currently working on Parto Sem Dor/Notes on Portuguese-ness, an ongoing project examining the complexities and meaning of contemporary "Portuguese-ness" - from an inquiry into how cultural and nationalist identities are constructed and transmitted to her personal introspections on her relationship to her family and country. As part of this project, Rita is developing a collaborative and co-participatory strand alongside East Midlands residents whose cultural ties connect to histories entangled with Portugal. Working together to reinterpret myths, symbols and stories, this strand seeks to build an ecology of knowledges around Portuguese-ness — one that holds multiple, often silenced perspectives on what that identity has meant, done, and continues to carry. Rita is the recipient of CVAN EM's Bigger Bursary, delivered in partnership with QUAD, and the Nottingham City Council Cultural Investment Fund supporting the development of the new collaborative work towards a solo exhibition at QUAD's Montage Gallery in November 2026 and a Zine Publication.