Visual Artist · Lisbon

About the Artist

Official records reduce a life to what the state agreed to see. The work begins where the document stops — in private language, in inherited knowledge, in the existence that was never written down and will not survive unless something holds it.

Research Focus

01.

Documentation

Official language reduces. The practice takes institutional structures — their own forms, formats, and authority — and turns that structure against its own exclusions. Each work targets the specific: the person the archive estimated, the life the official record misread or refused to see.

02.

INFORMATION loss

Every official record is a choice about what to include. The people at the center of this work were estimated, approximated, or refused entirely — women whose birthdates the state never recorded, whose knowledge survived only in private transmission. The practice inherits that loss and works from inside it.

03.

Visibility and Social Verdicts

Written words function as institutional forms: attempts to reduce a body to a category. Making those inscriptions visible turns the violence into a site of resistance. Visibility is not safety. It is a negotiation.

Method and Media

My interest lies in the production of images — in what bodies, time, and memory produce when subjected to formal pressure. The image is the core site; the medium is determined by what needs to be expressed.
artist books
photography
installation
long-form writing
textile
drawing
painting

Each project determines its own form. When an image cannot fully exist within a single frame, or when a frame isn’t enough, I move toward other structures. The flexibility is a non-stylistic response to the urgency of what needs to be expressed.

Short bio

Wilame Lima is a French-Brazilian queer artist based in Lisbon. Born in Aracaju, Sergipe, he has lived and worked across Brazil, the United States, Switzerland, France, Austria, and Portugal. He is also the founder and curator of Casa Oxente, a contemporary gallery in Lisbon dedicated to Brazilian art.

Born: Aracaju, Sergipe, Brazil
Based:  Lisbon / Vienna
Nationality: Franco-Brazilian
Also: Founder, Casa Oxente
Full CV: → Press & CV