Luísa Cunha, the Portuguese conceptual artist whose whispering sound installations and language-based works made her one of her country’s most influential contemporary artists, died on Monday of cancer at Lisbon’s Hospital de São José. She was 77. 

Over a career that began in the early 1990s, Cunha built a body of work that quietly transformed ordinary words into immersive works of art. Using whispered recordings, brief commands and fragments of conversation, she invited viewers to reconsider how language shapes space, memory and human relationships.