Madrid,
PHotoESPAÑA will celebrate its first twenty-nine editions and will do so by claiming creativity, experimentation and exploration of the possibilities of photography, bringing together, as always, established and emerging professionals.
From May 13 to September 13, forty exhibitions will be part of its Official Section – up to a hundred will be offered, including the rest of the sections – and three hundred artists will show their works. The motto this time will be reimaginesince the organization wants to highlight the value of curiosity and rebellion as tools to question reality, the veracity of images and their modes of production; also target young people as the audience of the future.
The Netherlands will be the guest country, and proposals from Dutch artists await us in the Círculo de Bellas Artes and in the exhibition hall of the Fernán Gómez Theater.
The first will be titled, precisely, “Reimagine” and will be structured as a dialogue between Spanish and Dutch creators around the photographic medium, the material and conceptual experimentation in it and the contemporary forms of representation in force at the current moment of transformation.
Geaninne Gutiérrez Guimarães will curate this exhibition, and has called on Rob Hornstra, Aleix Plademunt, Txema Salvans, Anoek Steketee, Javier Arboledas, Jon Gorospe, Eduardo Nave, Juan Couder, Rafael Trapiello, Lurdes Basolí, Ira Lombardía or the duo formed by Arguiñe Escandón and Yann Gross.
The also Dutch Viviane Sassen will star in this second of PHotoESPAÑA’s big bets with “LUX & UMBRA”, at the Fernán Gómez Theater. Cultural Center of the Village. This is the first individual work by this author in our country and will review more than three decades of creation from a poetic perspective.
Marked by his childhood in Kenya, Sassen’s work develops a look closely linked to light, landscape and African communities, in addition to raising a reflection on their visibility and representation in contemporary culture. In his universe, women occupy a central place.
The Mapfre Foundation, for its part, will once again join PHotoESPAÑA with the exhibition “In the American West”, a review of the images from the photobook of the same name by Richard Avedon published in 1985, and considered his masterpiece and a key volume of contemporary portraiture. It will also host “Ground Rules”, an exhibition that will cover more than two decades of Alejandro Cartagena’s career.
The Telefónica Foundation Space will host “Robert Frank and The Americans”, the presentation for the first time in Spain of the photographic series taken by the Swiss during a trip to the United States in the mid-fifties. Curated by David Campany, it will discuss why it continues to challenge new generations even today.
The Casa de México Foundation will host “Spectros. Enigmas of the gaze”, an examination of the work of seven Mexican photographers whose production seeks to transcend the identification of the visible. And the Blanquerna bookstore will invite us to the exhibition “Colita. Nosaltres no tenim por, nosaltres som”, which shows for the first time the entire photographic report made by Isabel Steva during the demonstration of June 26, 1977 in Barcelona, the first major protest for the rights of homosexual people in Spain.
Isabel Muñoz, meanwhile, will star in the third edition of the project Field notebooks in the Gallery of Royal Collections. In “The Stones of Heaven” he leads our gaze to the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the surrounding forest of La Herrería and the figure of Philip II within the framework of a telluric and sensory experience.
At the Serrería Belga Cultural Space, Isabel Azkarate from San Sebastián will exhibit “Azkarate vs. Azkarate”, a proposal that will be a continuation of her more than four decades of experience as a photojournalist and street photographer. The same venue will bring together the finalist books for the PHotoESPAÑA Best Photography Book of the Year Award.
Other exhibitions will address the relationship of photography with the body, identity, politics or social structures, memory or territory from critical and experimental perspectives.
The Lázaro Galdiano Museum will offer “Bunny”, the first Spanish individual by Talia Chetrit, composed of portraits, staged scenes (tables) and still lifes. For her part, Laia Abril will present an unprecedented installation at the National Museum of Romanticism, “Endometriosis”, about gender bias in medicine, obstetric violence or sexual and reproductive health.
The intimate dimension of the body will also have to do with “Columna”, by Sonia Celma, which will display at COAM an intimate reflection on the maternal bond, architecture and bodily fragility.
At the same headquarters, the Argentine Matías Costa, who won the PHotoESPAÑA Discoveries award in its first edition, brings us “What is born”, a compendium of his evolution.
Additionally, in Matadero Madrid, the Navarrese Greta Alfaro will present “Ofertorio”, an exploration of rituals and public spaces in contemporary life, while Gema Polanco will exhibit the installation at the National Museum of Decorative Arts My whole house is an altara dialogue between the domestic, the symbolic and the everyday.
Studying institutional structures from a critical approach, Tanit Plana stars in “Disfunctionas” at the Cerralbo Museum, a specific intervention related to the tension between the institutional logics that support the museum and the living reality of its collections. For her part, Bego Antón presents “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” at Casa de América, a series marked by humor around the emotional relationships between women and their dogs.
The links between image, territory and memory will, on the other hand, be the backbone of the exhibitions “On the Geography of the River”, by Linarejos Moreno, at the National Archaeological Museum; or “Ruina Montium”, by Raphaëlle Peria, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, where the landscape of Las Médulas will become a field of visual experimentation.
Also in the Circle we will find the Polish Rafał Milach and his “Refusal. Second Fracture”, an analysis of the mechanisms of construction and fissure of the official accounts of Eastern Europe.
For its part, reflection on the limits of the photographic medium will focus José Quintanilla’s exhibition at CentroCentro “The Revealed Garden.” Approaching the language of painting, Quintanilla will outline new expressive ways far from the documentary tradition in relation to the urban and social tensions of the contemporary city.
The ICO Museum will host “The same places”, a tour of the work of Jorge Yeregui, and at the Bernabéu we will be able to get closer to the work of José Manuel Ballester, who for six years has documented the transformation of the stadium with almost architectural precision.
For its part, the Museum of Contemporary Art will host “Topography of a contrast”, a reading of Madrid through photography, according to authors such as Ramón Masats, José Manuel Ballester or Alberto García-Alix.
The Complutense Art Center will host “Ways of Seeing”, the final projects of fifty contemporary visual artists, derived from personal and formal research processes around issues such as the construction of identity, memory and the sense of belonging.
Finally, the Canal de Isabel II Room already explores the links between photography and fashion with “Nostalgia / Utopia”, an exhibition that covers two decades of creation by the designer Ana Locking, and in its neighbor Parque de Santander a selection of photographs taken by Jesús Madriñán of her garments is presented. At the same venue, Chema Madoz will exhibit some of his visual poems.
Other cities in the official section will be Alcalá de Henares, Barcelona, Corao Castiellu (Asturias), Gijón, Santander, Seville, València and Zaragoza and around thirty galleries will join the OFF chapter.
