Isa Magalhães (Kideo Kidō) is an Awarded Portuguese Artist and Actress, born in Espinho in 1983 and living in Vila Nova de Gaia. She graduated from Escola Superior Artística do Porto (2006) and from The New Actors Workshop Conservatory (2008) in New York City.
Isa creates projects that span various disciplines, from Painting, Performance, Drawing, Sculpture, Installation to Video Art, exploring relevant themes in the contemporary context through immersive and multisensory works.
Her professional career is marked by an active participation in experimental and political theatre, including collaborations with the following theatre companies: The Living Theatre in New York City (2009-10) and A Barraca in Lisbon (2013-14).
She has held exhibitions at the Days Are Gallery in Porto (2022), at FACE/Municipal Museum of Espinho (2024), at Oriente Museum in Lisbon (2024), among others. Her main Group Exhibitions include a participation in the XIV Atlantic Axis Painting Biennial around several cities in Spain and Portugal (2023-24), in the Salón Métamorphose in Paris (2022-23), in the XVII Desideri Lombarte in Spain (2021) and in the Municipal Gallery of Porto (2006).
Her work is part of several private collections and a public collection.
In 2024, she was recognized with an Award and a Scholarship by the Oriente Foundation.
In the same year, she became an Associate Artist of the Blue Flag Programme in the city of Espinho, developing several Educational Activities, and many collaborations and exhibitions within an Artistic Residency at FACE/Municipal Museum.
Isa is a conceptual and multidisciplinary artist whose central concerns are intervention, form, space, immersion, inclusion, material and exploration, and who finds references in mass culture.
She enjoys exploring common and, in most works, recycled materials, inspired by the artistic movement Dadaism, to open the dialogue about sustainability.
From these materials, she transforms spaces into multisensory experiences, creating large-scale immersive installations. These works are, most of the time, produced with the involvement of the community during meetings with the artist or during artistic residencies.
Through these processes, she creates intimate, satirical, political, melancholic and humorous exhibitions.
Highlighting the disparity between fiction and reality, private and public, her work communicates relevant messages in the contemporary context, while presenting intimate and personal narratives, and stories that are behind the creation, demystifying its creative act.
The influence of the works that prioritize the creative act in relation to the final product, comes, for example, from the work of artists from the Fluxus group in the 60s. The themes addressed constitute a new contemporary look at religion, identity and sexuality.
In her installations, the materials used are literally cut, torn, glued and overlapped, during an intuitive creation process. In addition, the production processes are often carried out in the exhibition and presentation venues themselves, during the creation of site specifics, which transform the physical space into a tactile, visual and sound experience.
The artist has always been influenced by Theatre and Film in her artistic practice, two forms of expression that she studied at The New Actors Workshop and New York Film Academy.
She often involves the audience in her installations, a hallmark of the New York City’s theatre company The Living Theatre, which she was part of when she lived in the USA. The experimental, rebellious and political character of her videos draws inspiration from the works of artists such as Isadora Duncan or Sophie Calle. In her video explorations, she is also inspired by Surrealist aesthetics, to create abstract works that express the world of dreams, the absurd and the unconscious, experimenting with changes in the color, speed and sound.
In recent years Isa has been working on site specific installations, combining painting, three-dimensional shapes and videos, using light, movement and shadow to interact with these techniques.
This process builds multiple dynamics, spaces and perspectives on two or three dimensions.
For Additional Information please contact: info@kideokido.com
In recent years Isa has been working on site specific installations, combining painting, three-dimensional shapes and videos, using light, movement and shadow to interact with these techniques.