Margarida Sardinha is an independent artist & director born in Lisbon, Portugal - 1978, who studied, lived and worked in London for ten years. She attended Fine Art Combined Media studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Her cross-media practice comprises site-specific installation, experimental film and animation, text, sound, digital photography and symbolic studies, which are by definition geometric kinetic works. Its main focus is the production of optical illusions a propos the spiritual in art, thus, juxtaposing parallel concepts within literature, philosophy, comparative religion, science, film and art. Using these perceptions she searches for spiritual/psychological stages of consciousness relating them to endless cycles of individual and/or universal growth. As an artist, she developed her practice as a symbolism researcher and composer, structuring symbols as a fluid matrix belonging to different spiritual/religious sources. Nevertheless the force residing in these symbols is geometrically interconnected and by understanding, selecting, and combining them into a matrix she built the substrate of her practice. Thus, she usually focuses on one particular symbol’s attributes and/or its derivative permutations when creating her single projects where re-accesses the deconstruction of dogmas from a geometric-archetypal stand. By balancing in between immutable and mutable forms and ideas she constantly challenges and reviews them probing a union of opposites. Sacred geometry, dynamic symmetry, archetypal symbology and colour being the basis of the work are explored in a transmutative process of building, photographing and animating these “signs” that are understood as imprinted/innate forms of consciousness enabling us to see, hear and speak aesthetically, emotionally, logically, spiritually and politically.

Currently her major projects have been Azulejo Oxímoro, KNOTWORK, Wave-Particle HyperLightness, Loop Log, Hyperbolic Hyparxis, Symmetry’s Portal, London Memory, HyperLightness ad absurdum, London Recycled, Darkness Reflexions, Projected Movement. She has exhibited her site-specific installation work both in museums, galleries and biennales in London, Lisbon and New York such as at the Aga Khan Foundation Ismaili Centre in Lisbon, Science Faculty of the University of Lisbon, Fernando Pessoa Museum, Natural History and Science Museum of Lisbon, Web Summit, Opera Gallery London, AC Institute [Direct Chapel] NY, Carousel-London, Ericeira Cultural Centre, Menier Chocolate Factory, Candid Arts Centre, Riverside Studios, Bethnal Green Town Hall. Margarida’s experimental digital animation films were Official Selection in over thirty film festivals worldwide winning the laurels of Winner of Best Cinematic Vision Awarded by London Film Awards, UK, Best Experimental Film at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival, Great Lakes Film Festival, Creative Arts Film Festival & Bridge Fest (Vancouver) and Best Spiritual & Religious Film at the Directors Circle Film Festival; it further won an Honourable Mention at the 23rd New Orleans Film Festival and the Awards of Merit by the Lucerne International Film Festival, The Indie, The Accolade and Rochester International Film Festival. Official Selection Revelation Perth International Film Festival, San Francisco Frozen Film Festival (nominated for Best Experimental Film), 10th In the Palace International Short Film Festival, Take Two Film Festival in New York, MIA@TheArmory, Beam Festival, 5th Columbia Gorge International Film Festival, MIX on Transmedia Writing and Digital Creativity, 7th International Streaming Festival, Denver Underground Film Festival, New Jersey Film Festival, Rockland Shorts International Series, Gold Lion Film Festival, Magmart Film & Video Festival. She won the Prize of Jovens Criadores (Young Creators Prize) awarded by the Portuguese Cultural Ministry and the Grupo Artes e Ideias in 1999.