Shanghai #1, 2010
Shanghai #2, 2010
Shanghai #3, 2010
Mexico City #1, 2009
Mexico City #2, 2009
Mexico City #3, 2009
Shanghai #4, 2010
Shanghai #5, 2010
Shanghai #6, 2010
Shanghai #7, 2010
Hong Kong #1, 2010
Hong Kong #2, 2010
Hong Kong #3, 2010
Hong Kong #4, 2010
Hong Kong #5, 2010
Jakarta #1, 2010
Jakarta #2, 2010
Jakarta #3, 2010
Jakarta #4, 2010
Jakarta #5, 2010
Jakarta #6, 2010
Jakarta #7, 2010
Istanbul #1, 2009
Istanbul #2, 2009
Istanbul #3, 2009
Istanbul #4, 2009
Istanbul #5, 2009
Istanbul #6, 2009
Istanbul #7, 2009
Istanbul #8, 2009
Cairo #1, 2009
Cairo #2, 2009
Cairo #3, 2009
Cairo #4, 2009
Cairo #5, 2009
Cairo #6, 2009
Cairo #7, 2009
Cairo #8, 2009
Cairo #9, 2009
Dubai #1, 2009
Dubai #2, 2009
Dubai #3, 2009
Dubai #4, 2009
Dubai #5, 2009
Dubai #6, 2009
Dubai #7, 2009
Dubai #8, 2009
Dubai #9, 2009
Los Angeles #1, 2009
Los Angeles #2, 2009
Los Angeles #3, 2009
Los Angeles #4, 2009
Los Angeles #5, 2009
Los Angeles #6, 2009
Los Angeles #7, 2009
Mexico City #4, 2009
Shanghai #8, 2010
Hong Kong #6, 2010
Jakarta #8, 2010
Mumbai #1, 2010
Mumbai #2, 2010
Mumbai #3, 2010
Mumbai #4, 2010
Mumbai #5, 2010
Mumbai #6, 2010
Mumbai #7, 2010
Mumbai #8, 2010
Mumbai #9, 2010
Jakarta #9, 2010
Futureland, 2010
“Cera's Futureland project, initiated in 2008, was his take on the recent “astonishing urban growth of cities”, as he writes, and its “impact on their inhabitants and the environment”. For this project he chose nine rapidly growing megacities on four continents: Istanbul, Cairo, Dubai, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Mumbai. His artistic approach in this project is not about trying to document or analyze this growth in the sense of putting the process in a chronological, systematical or comparable order. Instead, his project is a collection of impressions and atmospheres, leaving it up to the viewer to judge or draw conclusions – if there are any – to these complex processes and the reasons behind them.”
— Florian Heilmeyer, Nuno Cera’s researches in urban growth, in uncube No. 23 Mexico City (2011)
“Cera’s work, which is neither modern nor romantic, is a fruit of experience of the urban condition, and above all of experience of the person who in the major cities – the realm of skyscrapers and sterile concrete high-rises – finds in the idea of life itself the most permanent and inescapable nostalgia.”
— Nuno Crespo, Nuno Cera - Futureland, in Zeitung für Kunst und Ästhetik, Nr. 11 (2010)
“Nuno Cera’s oeuvre comes across as a means (more explicit than many current photography and video works, but also more subtle than the many instances of art that is either programmatic and political or confessional and subjective) to present a pair of complementary issues: search and train- ing/formation. This pair has an outward side: revelation and knowledge. ”
— João Pinharanda, The City as Fiction (2010)
“The ‘megacity’ is a strange animal. Outsized and unruly, it seems to escape all definition and defy any representation. Maybe the mega- city is just a myth. A pure product of the imagi- nation. A chimerical creature that only appears when we invoke it through an elaborate ritual that involves flying around the world and call- ing its name in as many languages and from as many sites and angles as possible. In, out, up, down, over and under. This is pretty much what Nuno Cera did.
He flew over Mexico City, dived deep into Shanghai, got lost in Dubai, searched for the edges of Jakarta, followed fictional paths driving through Los Angeles and walking through Istanbul, looked up at Hong Kong from the streets, jumped out of random train stations in Mumbai, and visited the roof tops of Cairo. Travelling through these multiple yet interconnected realities, he also reappropriated each of these cities as fictional constructs.”
— Matias Echanove & Rahul Srivastava, Futureland and the Global Urban Blur: Theorizing the work of Nuno Cera (2010)