Gabriel Abrantes is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores historical, social, and political themes through improbable narratives where absurdity, melodrama, folklore, and autobiography are closely intertwined. Through animation, painting, cinema, internet culture, and art history, his work creates emotionally intense scenes in which humour and catastrophe, intimacy and collapse, occur side by side. 

Bardo Loops presents four interconnected looping animations set within the bardo—an intermediate state between death and rebirth in several Buddhist traditions. Across flooded interiors, wildfire-ravaged forests, abandoned palaces, and devastated coastlines, ghostly figures drift through cycles of grief, conflict, reconciliation, and desire. Their emotional exchanges, oscillating between tenderness and absurdity, echo the compulsive repetitions of contemporary digital spaces, where affect circulates through loops, echoes, and performance. Personal tragedy and planetary collapse become mirror images of one another, each amplifying and destabilising the other’s claim to urgency.

Hovering between mourning and dark humour, intimacy and climate urgency, Bardo Loops approaches personal and planetary grief as shared symptoms of a world out of joint.