Espai 13

Exhibition program

Fixations per Minute

Dates

10/02/2023 — 21/01/2024

Place

Espai 13

Curated by

Yaby (Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo)

Reading has a longstanding relationship with contemporary art, for which it is a constant wellspring of both poetic and discourse- inspiration. Recent art employs various visual strategies to address reading from a more critical perspective, suspecting the book as a mere source of pleasure and knowledge, singling it out as a complex device of subjectivisation that commits violence that is not always evident.

In this thought context, reading is revealed to be a process endowed with power, a process that includes the construction of the narratives, hierarchies and exclusions that exceed the text and determine the existence of certain bodies and the way they are read.

The exhibitions encompassed within Fixations per Minute use diverse visual media to complicate some of the technical and rhetorical mechanisms of reading by exposing their political consequences. The four exhibitions in this season address, among other issues, the role of the material and prelinguistic substrate in the circulation of power, the incorporation of the corporeal and the toxic in communication, the situated use of non-alphabetic ways of interpreting the world and the rewriting of the archive and its historical narratives.

The title of the project is a reference to the formula used to calculate reading speed. Each fixation is the moment the eyes fixate on a word: the lower the number of fixations per minute, the higher the speed at which you process text. The term also designates the entry point of a text into the body, while pointing to the ability of language to fix meanings and impose itself, just as an obsession does.