Silvestre Pestana (1949, Funchal, Madeira) is one of the most radical and least known figures in Portuguese contemporary art. A poet, artist, and performer, Pestana has created a singular body of work in a variety of media since the late 1960s.
Emerging from a group of experimental poets in the 1960s, Pestana combined the visual arts with poetry as a form of resistance against censorship in early drawings, collages, and sculptures. Between 1969 and 1974, in Sweden, he created public interventions in the form of gardens and performance-based actions that suggested the fragile ecological and social conditions of contemporary life. Returning to Portugal after the 1974 Revolution, Pestana developed a unique visual grammar using light, language, and visual forms that conceived of the human body as a social, ideological, and technological circuit. The politicized actions, collages, and photographs from 1970s and 1980s use his body to activate linguistic and non-linguistic codes, while attempting to expand poetry into a spatial and choreographic practice.
The artist’s polemical performances of the 1970s and 1980s – documented in a few remaining images – presciently addressed how technologies of the third industrial revolution could elicit both horror and fascination, offering both forms of entertainment and control. Biometrics, militarization, and the extension of the human into a vast information network mark his photography, video, and installation work of the 1980s. Using the moving image as a tool for performative and poetic action, Pestana became one of the pioneering figures of video art in Portugal. Always an early adopter of novel technologies, he has used computing, gaming software, and drones in recent decades to develop new expressions of artistic resistance, continuing his decades-long engagement with various political and technological systems that permeate contemporary life.

His most recent exhibitions include VERTIGEM04: sociedade aberta in the 3rd part of the Maia Biennial (2015); Sufoco, Galeria Múrias Centeno, Lisboa (2015); Sufoco? Intermundos? Drones V, 2014, Espaço Mira, Porto (2014); Povo Novo Virtual. Silvestre Pestana nas Escritas Po.Ex, Casa da Escrita, Coimbra (2013); Anos 70: Atravessar fronteiras, Centre of Modern Art, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2010) and FÉNIX acção: socialmente reprovado por envelhecimento prematuro, Uma Certa Falta de Coerência, Porto (2009); Silvestre Pestana: TECNOFORMA at Serralves Museum, Porto (2016); Silvestre Pestana: Um Artista De Contraciclos, at Núcleo de Arte Oliva, S. João da Madeira (2017) and Forum da Maia/Centr’Arte (2019).