Miguel Cipriano, Portugal / Belgium

Miguel Cipriano (Lisbon, 1989) is a Brussels-based visual artist working primarily with photography. His work engages with questions of materiality, perception and our digital condition. He holds an MFA in Photography, graduating magna cum laude from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and a BA in Cinema from the Lisbon Theatre and Film School. His masters’ thesis, Towards a Poetics of the Fluid Photograph, introduced the notion of an image whose meaning is never fixed but remains in flux, a concept that
continues to guide his artistic practice today.

His projects often emerge from observation of online phenomena and their physical manifestations in everyday life. His early project I like it here. Where am I? investigated how the social web reconfigures intimacy and reshapes the boundary between public and private spheres. During a residency at BredaPhoto Festival, he developed Tingle Heaven, where he drew from the ASMR community to reflect on online rituals of self-care and the body’s negotiation with
technology. Most recently, Unboxing examined the physical remnants of the online consumer culture by reframing details of delivery packaging through photography and sculpture.

At the Royal Academy of Fines Antwerp, he took part in the academic research project The Unruly Apparatus, which explored photography’s potential to enter sculptural territory. His work has been shown at FOMU Antwerp, BredaPhoto Festival, and in international group exhibitions. He has participated in art residencies in the Netherlands, France and Portugal, and he continues to expand his interest in the intersections of image, object, and digital environments. Miguel's photographic work, which deals with the transformation of the private sphere in an increasingly technological world, has been exhibited in Portugal, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Miguel participated in the L'AiR Arts Curated Group Program in 2022 and is coming back for an individual residency and exhibition at Atelier 11 in July 2026.

His new project proposes an exhibition centered on the representation of the human body at the intersection of sculpture, photography and contemporary digital technologies. Taking the artistic milieu of Cité Falguière and the École de Paris as a historical point of reference (within which past resident Portuguese artist Diogo de Macedo and many other artists developed their work), the project reflects on how sculptural practices have engaged with time, material transformation and the act of making, and how these concerns can be revisited today from a different technical and cultural position.