Luísa Cunha, the Portuguese Artist Whose Sound Sculptures Explored the Power of Language, Dies at 77
Portuguese conceptual artist Luísa Cunha, known for minimalist “sound sculptures” built from whispered recordings and language-based installations, died of cancer at Lisbon’s Hospital de São José on Monday at age 77. Born in Lisbon in 1949, she earned a degree in Germanic Philology from the University of Lisbon and later completed the Advanced Sculpture Course at AR.CO in 1994, teaching there until 1997; she exhibited regularly from 1993 onward. Her best-known work includes “Do What You Have to Do” (1994), in which two suspended speakers repeat variations of a sentence, a piece Artforum critic Miguel Amado discussed in 2013 as transforming a command into both authority and resistance. Cunha received the EDP Foundation’s Art Grand Prize in 2021 and showed work in venues including the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Serralves Foundation, as well as the 14th Sydney Biennale.
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This story was covered in Museum Power Plays and Cultural Flashpoints