We look back to an article that the art critic Arnau Puig wrote for the Fundació Joan Miró several years ago and that continues to be relevant today. It is a look at the body and art with no boundaries, which ties into the recent proposal of a tour of the Joan Miró Collection from a queer perspective.
Continue reading Bodies with no Boundaries
Fascinated by both her character and her work, Leila Méndez, a self-taught photographer living in Barcelona, provides us with a multiple portrait of the different facets of Lee Miller. In just a few shots, Méndez captures the essence of the surrealist artist and of other photographers who, like Miller, experienced the vulnerability and the power that you feel in front of a camera, posing as a professional model.
Continue reading The Future was Female
In this article, Dolors Bramon, a historian with a PhD in Semitic languages, takes a historical look at the conflict between different cultures in Spain inaccurately referred to as convivencia. The author questions the honesty of the meaning of multiculturalism and underscores the need for repairing historical injustices. As in Kader Attia’s work, for Dolors Bramon scars are cries against oblivion.
Continue reading Scars and Reparations
Like the force fields that keep particles together in atoms, the apparently distant connections between narratives and individuals sometimes converge in similar reflections. Such is the case of the random encounter of isolation, the main subject of the exhibition program The Possibility of an Island, with the thread of thoughts that Agustín Fernández Mallo subtly weaves in this new article for our blog.
Agustín Fernández Mallo, a physicist and writer based in Palma de Mallorca and the author of the Nocilla Dream, Nocilla Experience and Nocilla Lab trilogy, among other works, is part of the current contemporary literature and art scene. His latest novel has been published in Spanish as Trilogía de la guerra.
Continue reading The (Im)possibility of an Island
The foyer at the Fundació, devoted to amateur photography, is currently the venue for the Joaquim Gomis exhibition titled Brossa at La Ricarda and will soon feature From a Pixel a Poem, by Cloe Masotta, as part of Epicentre Brossa, an activities programme centred on the life and work of Joan Brossa, the poet and visual artist who transformed contemporary Catalan culture.
Cloe Masotta, a film critic and professor who handles film programming for museums and cultural centres, has completed a research project on Joan Brossa as part of the Independent Studies Programme at the MACBA Museum in Barcelona. Here she tells us about her immersion into Brossa’s world and describes the sequence of coincidences through which the poet worked his way into her life.
Continue reading Meeting Joan Brossa
The Espai 13 programme for the 2016-17 season, One Foot Out. Expeditions and Diasporas, features six works produced on the periphery of the usual circuits of contemporary art. Halfway through the programme, essayist and writer Eloy Fernández Porta addresses the notion of periphery in seven pieces of short fiction.
Continue reading Citizens of Neitherbarnormad
The explanation is as follows: to consider a risk involves calculating. It’s true that this is probably determined by the verb to consider, but it is no less true that the noblest of things (in Montaigne’s terms) tend to deprecate risk. They don’t ‘consider’ it. Or not much. Risk in art is nothing in itself. At the most, it is a subsidiary element to other deeper things, by no means an ultimate goal. Does risk really mean anything at all in art? Isn’t risk simply a token of what we had previously been determined to do?
Continue reading The Curse of Saying
‘I play chess day and night. I like painting less and less,’ stated Marcel Duchamp in 1923 after finishing one of his great works, Le Grand Verre (The Large Glass). It is impossible to separate the painter from the chess player, because Duchamp’s art was always in check, and he viewed this mental sport as a source of creativity.
Continue reading Art in Check: Passion and Obsession
Living abroad means having time stand still in one place while it speeds up somewhere else. It isn’t the effect of jet lag or of different time zones. A capricious, subjective internal sense of time stirs up emotions and changes priorities. Who do we belong to? Where do we belong? Psychologists and sociologists who have considered the matter in depth would speak of it with more authority, but it would be terribly boring to take the intuitions that a new life can give us and sum them up in a scientific headline, wouldn’t it?
Continue reading From leaving as a learning experience to ‘Muna’s Journey’