Biography

Nuno Silas is a curator and artistic director, multidisciplinary researcher, and artist whose work focuses on curatorial practice and the history of museum collections. He is a PhD Candidate in History and Philosophy of Science, with specialisation in Museology, at the University of Évora.

He has collaborated with renowned institutions, such as the Humboldt Forum, Iwalewahaus Bayreuth, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, EGEAC, CCFMA, and Goethe Maputo. He holds a BA Degree from the ESAD.CR — School of Arts and Design and attended a MA in African Verbal and Visual Arts at the University of Bayreuth (UB). At UB, he collaborated with DFG-Funded Research Projects, such as ‘“Black Atlantic Revisited” – African and South American UNESCO World Heritage Sites and “Shadowed Spaces” of Performative Memory‘ and ‘Multiple Artworks – Multiple Indian Ocean‘. He was the co-curator and artistic director of the project ‘Black Skin, White Masks: The Black Body in Presence‘ at Galerias Municipais (EGEAC, Lisbon), and curator of the exhibition project ‘Olhares Críticos sobre o Arquivo: Sombras e Memórias‘ (Difficult Memories and Decolonization in Portugal), organised in collaboration with Plano Nacional das Artes (PNA), Paulo Freire Institute Berlin, and Goethe Institute Lisbon.

Research fields

• Museology
• Colonial heritage
• Artistic practices
• Curatorship and contemporary art

Selected publications

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Main projects

• “Revisiting colonial collections and cultural heritage in the post-colonial context: Slave trade memories in ethnographic collections in Mozambique, Portugal, Germany” — PhD thesis to be presented to the University of Évora, supervised by Elisabete Pereira (IHC — University of Évora) and Ute Fendler (University of Bayreuth).
• Collaborator of the project “‘Black Atlantic Revisited’ – African and South American UNESCO World Heritage Sites and ‘Shadowed Spaces’ of Performative Memory” — Coordinated by Ute Fendler (University of Bayreuth) and funded by the German Research Foundation. [link]
• Collaborator of the project “Multiple Artworks – Multiple Indian Ocean” — Coordinated by Ute Fendler (University of Bayreuth) and funded by the German Research Foundation. [link]