It can be considered that what became known as "primitivism" has a long history, but it was at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century that it was expressed unequivocally. Colonization and fascisms, along with the development of mass culture and consumption amidst Europe's malaise, spurred fascination and fetishization around cultures that were considered "remote," "primordial," "primitive," "naïve," "archaic," "savage," "primeval," among other designations. The appreciation and valorization by artists, intellectuals, and art dealers of objects from non-European territories, mostly colonized, but also from local contexts such as folk art, along with the exponential development of image reproduction techniques, spread the primitivist aesthetic in the visual culture of modernity in the West.

Primitivism was a way for art to renew itself and assert its modernity, an artistic practice of returning to origins and (re)beginnings. It brought about a true aesthetic revolution in 20th-century Western art, while simultaneously emptying the temporality and history of the objects it considered "primitive," relegating them to an indeterminate distant past. In times of fascisms and imperialisms, it served both as a nationalist tool legitimizing the colonial project and as a libertarian and anti-colonial tool, as many intellectuals and artists drew from primitivist ideals driven by a desire to subvert the established social order. However, stereotypes, prejudices, and a homogeneous vision of the "Other" were present in the various, sometimes conflicting and antagonistic, uses of primitivism.

Problems of Primitivism — from Portugal is an exhibition that, based on extensive research in Portuguese archives and collections, interrogates "primitivism" and the contradictions of this historical and cultural process from the perspective of this country. Investigative and experimental in nature, and without the pretense of exhausting the subject, the curatorial proposal calls upon the entire museum for a critical approach through a polyphony of voices in the sources and among the invited authors and artists.

Six interrelated keywords organize the exhibition: Civilization, Museum, Naïve, "Portuguese Sea," "Jazz Band," and Extraction. Through them, what is shown is not a fixed chronology, but diagrammatic paths and correlations, flows, tensions, and synapses between texts and images, as well as the interaction between "high" culture and mass culture, between history, art history, politics, anthropology, and economics, and also the ideological, social, and cultural structure upon which the dissemination of an intense visuality related to the idea of the "primitive" was based.

The exhibition addresses the problems of primitivism from Portugal in its relations with the context of dictatorship, colonization, anti-colonialism, and post-colonialism, in a visual machine imbued with artistic and cultural images and references that problematize the invention of the "primitive" and its persistence into contemporary times.