With Bardo Loops, Gabriel Abrantes’ signature anthropomorphism is as emotional and ingenious as ever.
Throughout his filmic oeuvre, multimedia artist Gabriel Abrantes has consistently returned to and nurtured an approach to exploring human emotions through non-human characters. The most famous example is The Artificial Humors (2016), a tidy answer to the common question “what if a robot could fall in love? What if it could do stand-up?” His approach becomes the perfect set-up for a joke; a run-off, perhaps, of parodic works like freud und friends (2015) and The hunchback (2016, with Ben Rivers). However, in recent films like two sculptures quarreling in a hotel room (2020), it becomes something more serious; the strength of Abrantes’ work is in the gap between the emotion and the character, a gap in which we find a crevasse of absurdity, complexity and the bittersweetness of the human condition.
This is no less true for Bardo Loops, currently on show at Gasworks. The exhibition consists of four films, three of which display an argument between ghosts (the other is a ghost playing a song on the piano about being sad). The arguments are quite varied in topic, but all centre around themes of loss, whether of communication, relationships, or children. Immediately, the computer-generated ghosts seem to represent this loss—this would be too easy for Abrantes. Look a little closer, and the ghosts, somewhat ironically, represent a sort of entrapment in the present.
On entering the space, it’s hard not to notice that Abrantes presents the first two films on the all too familiar 9:16 ratio of a smartphone screen. It isn’t surprising, then, that the first of the two is the melancholic pianist, whose ghostly emptiness seems to come from shifting all of his emotions into an audienceless performance, a search for validation common on social media. On the adjacent screen, two ghosts sit on a porch. One of them is waxing lyrical about how ancestry tests fuel white, colonial supremacy—a fair point, if it weren’t for the fact that the other ghosts, whom the first is tirading, is using the test to find out her lost child’s cause of death. This truth is only reached at the end, because, as the argument ensues, the derisions and defences go unheard, drifting right through the empty, ghostly figures.
In one fell swoop, Abrantes breaks down the ways that social media, the harbinger of both virtue-signalling for progression and the keeper of all histories, is a purgatory that loops complex human emotions into short, digestible signifiers. Meaning becomes a metonym, emotion and effect become tokens—the emotional presence of humanity becomes a superficial apparition.
For those who were hoping for the fun side of Abrantes’ work, there is a touch of the black comic in these works, if you really search for it. All hope of finding it, however—in fact, all hope in general—is lost as you move into the second room. Two large, floor-to-ceiling screens face each other, meeting in the middle with beautiful contrasts of cold blue and grey with bright, warm orange and red.
The cogent representation of human emotions in the contemporary moment deepens, splitting like a fork in the road towards two types of despair. The first, the break-up of two ghosts, is marked by a feeling of melancholy that their emotional separation is too strong to overcome. In the second, the break-up is more dramatic, with emotion coming out in insults and digging up dirt, as raging as the bushfires behind and yet underlined by a crushing feeling of exhaustion.
There is a sense of liberation here, both from the invented logical constraints of the ancestry test argument, but also literally from the change in aspect ratio and brighter colours. However, they are still ghostly; they still loop, as if no resolution is possible until they actually listen to each other. In this way, the show seems to work in reverse order; Abrantes is not just critiquing our opacity, pushing blame on social media, for example, to justify it. He is exposing the roots of the problem, which are very much still human. If anything, the crystallisation of this opacity on our phone screens makes this fact comically present before our eyes. And yet, we don’t see it, as we are just ghosts, existing, not living, in the world.
It is hard to narrow down Abrantes’ brilliance as an artist to one defining quality. Bardo Loops perfectly exemplifies his scriptwriting skills, tapping into emotional nuances, but also the way this feeds into an overarching ability to create absurd rifts between cartoonish characters and their deep emotional profiles. Plus, there is, of course, his undeniable animating skills, which paint accurate emotions on what is essentially a CGI cloth with holes in it. The consistent quality of Abrantes’ work is the sort you want to follow along with, to see where it goes next; and if you’re unfamiliar, Bardo Loops is certainly a great place to start.
Gabriel Abrantes: Bardo Loops is on show at Gasworks until 14th June 2026. For more information, visit their website.
Image: Gabriel Abrantes, Bardo Loops, 2024. Animation, sound, colour. Commissioned by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Francisco Fino.
