Inês Zenha

Inês Zenha was born in Lisbon in 1995 and lives and works between Lisbon and Paris. Their multidisciplinary practice encompasses installation, painting, sculpture, and ceramics, which they use to investigate the formal and conceptual representation of the queer body. Their work considers the body as a site shaped by heteropatriarchal structures while also exploring its potential for liberation, transformation, and the construction of new forms of identity and ontology. Zenha’s practice is grounded in an ongoing exploration of the relationships between the body, identity, desire, and power. Their works often approach the body not as a fixed or stable entity, but as something continuously negotiated and transformed through social, cultural, and affective relations. Questions of vulnerability and intimacy are closely connected to broader reflections on the ways power operates through the body and how desire can become a means of resistance and self-determination. Across different media, Zenha combines material and formal experimentation with an interest in the emotional and political dimensions of embodiment. Painting, sculpture, ceramics, and installation become interconnected ways of examining how bodies are represented, perceived, and experienced. Their practice is particularly attentive to the tensions between constraint and freedom, vulnerability and agency, and the individual and the structures that seek to define it. Zenha graduated in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins in London. Following a residency in 2020, they moved to Paris, where they are currently based, while maintaining a connection with Lisbon. Their position between the two cities informs a practice that moves between different cultural contexts while remaining focused on questions of identity, embodiment, desire, and belonging. Through an evolving combination of sculpture, ceramics, painting, and installation, Zenha develops a visual language in which the body becomes both subject and material of investigation. Their work reflects on the possibility of reshaping inherited forms of identity and power, proposing instead more fluid and open understandings of the body, intimacy, and selfhood.