Antares draws critically from the legacy of twentieth-century Brazilian modernism, a movement that presented itself as a universal language of progress. Its clean structures and controlled designs signalled order and clarity, yet in practice they often hid inequality and reinforced authority. De Azambuja turns to concrete, once modernity’s emblem, for its paradoxical nature between its grounding purpose and sense of alienation. Cracks are left visible; seeds and fingerprints interrupt its polished surface. What once claimed to be smooth and rational is revealed as fragile, shaped and strained by the weight of its own ideology.

The exhibition echoes the speculative energy of the utopian architectural movements of the 1960s–70s, when cosmic imagery was used to imagine alternative futures. However, where those projects often sought transcendence through technological optimism, Antares grounds this impulse in material critique. Instead of escape, it asks what it means to reorient from within.

Together, the works trace how ideology embeds itself in matter, and how resistance may arise not through destruction, but through recalibration. Orientation, the exhibition argues, is no longer about following a fixed star — but recognising when it begins to shift.