Lauren Maganete was born in Bragança in 1970 and studied in Porto, graduating in Business Administration and Management. She is the Municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia’s official photographer since 2009. She has works published in several national and international magazines and newspapers. Lauren participates regularly in individual and collective exhibitions, having already passed through Madrid, Lisbon, Porto, Vila Nova de Gaia, Coimbra and Águeda. She works as a freelance photographer, collaborating with several institutions and companies. Her work is in several public and private collections. In 2016 won the Mira Mobile Prize, promoted by Mira Forum/Mira Space and participated as an invited artist at the Gaia Biennials of 2015 and 2017.
Lauren Maganete photographs compulsively and in the context of the deep friendship and complicity that we have been developing over the years, the journey, from the north to the south of the country, was our space and time of hugs and smiles. The journey, however, has emerged as one of the great themes of her artistic photography, characterized by details and attention to small fractions of a second that distinguish themselves in the passage of time. The space-time relationship is the genesis of her conceptual framework, consubstantiated by the fast but slow glance of what surrounds it.
In the work that Lauren Maganete has developed in recent years, the idea of traveling, of multiculturalism and of individual journey in search of a path, in a poetic and sensorial perspective, is in this break between compulsion and detail. The show that is now being presented is part of an individual exhibition that the photographer had in Bragança, returning to her native land and that was configured as the past and the hidden memory, symbolized by the escape forward, a symptomatic route of successive generations that choose other laps, other stops.
Now, closer to home, her photographs challenge other audiences who share her initial training in management. Curious, isn’t it? It is rather a certain karmic charge that crosses her artistic path, full of reflections and details like her photographs. In the words of the artist: “The photographs keep the unique movement of each one, amplify idiosyncrasies, perpetuate the connection that is made between what we are and the ground, becoming therefore the stage, always.”
Helena Mendes Pereira
shairart’s chief curator
