Sonia Martins Mateus

AVA Exhibition: FROZEN TALES (Group Show) | 24.04.25 - 05.06.25

As a result of her Portuguese family’s complex heritage of displacement and movement, Sonia Martins Mateus travels through remote, rural, arid and desert territories to inform her practise. Collecting materials, documents and testimonies, her work unfolds in different forms: sculptures, drawings, photographs or‘landscape-sculptures’ (installations) - all of which are traces of a personal and collective history, of a culture that is popular as it is universal. Mateus’ work has a poetic quality that is both gentle and brutal, a strange in-between where our relationship with our origins lies, familial, geographical or social.

In 2019 Martins Mateus graduated from ESAM Caen with honours in History and Fine Arts. After a number of exhibitions, she was awarded a residency at the Cité Internationnale des Arts in 2022, resulting in a visual and sound performance at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen. After her first international exhibition in 2023, The Invisible Thread, at the AVA Gallery in Cape Town, South Africa, she went on to perform in Bern during the summer season while being based in Normandy with a studio at the art factory Le Bazarnaom. In 2025, Martins Marteus returned to South Africa for a creative and research residency in the Klein Karoo, at GO Residency in Oudtshoorn.

Website: https://www.soniamartinsmateus.com/

Instagram: @soniamartinsmateus

exhibition

Association for Visual Arts .