We're pleased to invite to the opening of Alisa Heil's SOFT POWER, on Sunday, September 13th at 6 PM.

 

Soft Power is an immersive installation in which crystals, charms, sound, light and scent come together to create a performative environment. The work emerges at a moment when public life is increasingly defined by polarization, while established geopolitical narratives are being fundamentally reconfigured.

Drifting from its origins in cultural diplomacy, Soft Power displaces the strategic language of persuasion, of winning “hearts and minds”, with the seductive glittering generality of LOVE, proposing gentleness not as a tactic of influence but as a mode of agency and love as a force for positive transformation.

Rather than focusing on coercion or control, Alisa explores the subtle ways in which we are shaped by desire, intimacy and shared experiences. The exhibition positions softness not in opposition to power, but as a transformative mode of relation: a capacity to reshape reality through permeability rather than imposition.

Here, power is understood as something that moves through atmospheres, memories and cultural forms, quietly shaping how we perceive ourselves and relate to others. Borders remain fluid, while agency emerges within the delicate dynamics of attention, attraction and mutual entanglement. The visitor is never simply an observer, but becomes part of the installation’s choreography.

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Alisa Heil (Germany, 1986) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Porto. Through immersive environments, she explores desire, memory and the symbolic structures of visual culture.. Drawing from folklore, literature and popular culture, her work inhabits the porous territory between fiction and reality, intimacy and collective imaginary.

Heil studied Performance at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, followed by postgraduate studies at Bauhaus University Weimar and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, for which she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.

Her work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, performances, screenings and biennials, including Manifesta 11, Zurich; the 12th Havana Biennial; the Marrakech Biennale; Culturgest Porto; the Bienal de Arte Contemporânea da Maia; Palais des Arts, Marseille; and Haus am Lützowplatz, Berlin.

Selected solo exhibitions include DIVORCE or how to dance a Damensolo at A Maior, Viseu (2025), Tiresias und der kleine Tod at Espaço Mira, Porto (2022), Spieglein Spieglein at Bombon Projects, Barcelona (2021), Planet der Sirenen at Galeria Nuno Centeno, Porto (2020), American Cream at Julius Cæsar Gallery, Chicago (2016) and Presente Invasivo at A Certain Lack of Coherence, Porto (2014).

In 2017, Alisa Heil founded Kunsthalle Freeport, an independent curatorial platform through which she has organized exhibitions and collaborative projects. Within this framework, she also hosts 13 Moons, an ongoing reading programme dedicated to literature, critical theory, and contemporary culture.