MIS presents the fourth exhibition in its Nova Fotografia 2026 program, featuring Ana Leal's series "Chão de histórias". This annual MIS initiative selects six emerging photographers through open call for solo museum exhibitions. The Programming Board curates selections under the supervision of MIS's curatorial team. Chosen series are unpublished works by photographers distinguished for technical and aesthetic originality, and enter the MIS collection after their exhibition run.
About "Chão de histórias"
"Chão de histórias" traverses time, matter and memory—a listening gesture toward what has been silenced in earth, archives and bodies. From a personal search for erased roots, the project maps the affective landscape of Pernambuco's sertão, the artist's paternal family's region of origin and a place long absent from her life. Between the visible and the concealed, the works propose intimate archaeology: an attempt to rebuild connections through juxtaposed gestures, materials and silences. Photography serves as both starting point and investigative body, expanding into collage, textiles, clay and manual layering to reinscribe presences in the present.
"Dobra do tempo" assembles collages of landscape photographs from Floresta and Vale do Catimbau combined with family archive images and renaissance lace, creating visual and symbolic folds between time and memory. "Encontro" merges ancestral portraits with dried sertão clay, affirming our inseparability from the soil that generates and returns us. "Álbum de família" presents botanical portraits of native Caatinga species treated as members of a living lineage. Across nature, body and image, "Chão de histórias" reconceives territory not as landscape but as skin—a sensitive surface where time leaves its marks.
About the artist
Ana Leal (Recife, 1969) is a visual artist based in São Paulo. Her practice spans photography, video, collage, ceramics and installation, investigating memory, impermanence, territory and transformation. She began her artistic career after working in economics and administration, developing research that extends from photography into diverse materials and image-making approaches. Her work has received Gold Winner at Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA), the Julia Margaret Cameron Award and Sony World Photography Awards finalist status. In 2025 she ranked in Critical Mass Top 200; in 2026 she was BBA Photography Prize finalist. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is held in the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts permanent collection.
