FORTHCOMING – CURRENT – PAST
Opening 19 January 2024 at Galeria ProjecteSD, Barcelona
IN A DIM LIGHT
/ BAJO UNA LUZ TENUE
In his book Is Racism an Environmental Threat? Ghassan Hage argues that the environmental breakdown we are experiencing today is rooted in colonial processes of geographical expansion, appropriation, overexploitation of nature and dehumanization of the other, past and present: "The practices of racial and ecological domination", he writes, "have the same roots". The title of the exhibition, In a Dim Light, alludes to the fragile visibility that falls onto, and emanates from, the bodies, objects and landscapes that have been destroyed by these processes, and that inhabit spectrally the museums of the present.
Download exhibition's Press Release [En] [Cas] [Cat]
Installation photograph © Roberto Ruiz
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From 15 December 2023 at Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
MACBA COLLECTION: PRELUDE. POETIC INTENTION
14.12.2023 - 17.06.2024
This group exhibition aims to reverse the dramaturgy of the museum by putting the artwork at the centre so we can address its will, its energy and its poetic intention.
Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Antònia M. Perelló, Claudia Segura, Patrícia Sorroche
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Private view 22 November 2023 at Caixa Forum Madrid, and 28 April 2024 at CaixaForum Barcelona
HORIZON AND LIMIT. LANDSCAPE VISIONS
Works from the collection: Tacita Dean, Patricia Dauder, Miquel Barceló, Joan Fontcuberta, Bleda & Rosa, Cristina Lucas, Xavier Ribas, Perejaume, Andreas Gursky, Rémy Zaugg, and others.
Curated by Nimfa Bisbe and Arola Valls.
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Private view 13 September 2023 at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago
WORK in PROGRESS _ CRISIS CLIMÁTICA
13.09.2023 - 26.10.2023
WiP 2023 se plantea como una oportunidad no sólo para expresar nuestra preocupación por la crisis climática, que hoy pone en peligro a nuestro planeta, sino también para celebrar procesos creativos capaces de transformarse en fuente de inspiración para actuar sobre este conflicto.
Curated by Gloria Saravia.
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Private view 15 September 2023 at C/o Berlin
IMAGE ECOLOGY
16.09.2023 - 18.01.2024
The group exhibition Image Ecology presents a global cross-section of twelve contemporary artistic responses in the form of photographs, video works, and installations. The artists employ experimental and traditional production methods, historical processes, as well as new technologies. The exhibition lays out the stages of the metabolic process in four thematically linked parts—Energy, Material, Labor, and Waste, ending by returning to the start with Energy.
Curated by Boaz Levin and Kathrin Schönegg. Installation photo: David von Becker (C/o Berlin).
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Private view 31 August 2023 at Hypha Studios, London
SEISMIC MOTHER
01.09.2023 – 28.09.2023
The average life expectancy of the human body is 72 years. The Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. Seismic Mother is an exhibition that captures the work of 20 artists whose work attempts to communicate the seemingly incomprehensible nature of the Earth’s magnitude and magnificence, temerity and resilience as it endures, regenerates and struggles to survive through the slow violence of ecological catastrophe.
Curated by Charly Blackburn and Holly Birtles.
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Private view 21 April 2023 at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Universidad de Chile, Santiago
LANDSCAPE, EXPERIENCE, PRODUCTION. Photography and Productive Landscapes in Chile (2000-2020)
21.04.2023 – 12.08.2023
The exhibition investigates the tension that exists between the photograph and the document; between visual interpretation and political activism; between contemplation, anger and perplexity. After the necessary endeavours of reportage and denunciation, in the last decades Chilean photography has expanded its horizon with the re-emergence of the photographic landscape as one of its focus of attention. This exhibition is conformed by a reasoned body of photographic images that record, allude to or articulate contemporary productive landscapes in Chile (2000-2020). The term productive landscapes refers to territories which are strongly adapted, confronted, degraded, secured or partially simulated or mitigated by current modes of production.
Curated by Jose Ignacio Vielma
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New publication
RESTITUCIONES. LA FOTOGRAFÍA EN DEUDA CON SU PASADO / RESTITUTIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY IN DEBT WITH ITS PAST
What can we say of the archives that preserve images taken during slavery and in concentration camps? Or of photographs depicting an ancestral heritage that has been destroyed or usurped? What of those whose repositories contain photographs of colonial violence, of people who have been executed? And what about photographs depicting contemporary global challenges? What can we say, for example, of albums documenting the extraction of natural resources, or the extinction of multiple species?
Edited by Carles Guerra
Contributors: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, teresa Ferré Panisello, Yasmine Eid-Sabbagh, Ana Longoni, Hilde Van Gelder, Michaëla danjé & Cases Rebelles, Xavier Ribas, T.J. Demos, Eyal Weizman
Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona (2023)
ISBN: 978-8498448368
264 pages
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Private view 1 February 2023 at Galeria ProjecteSD, Barcelona
2003-2023. 20 YEARS
01.02.2023 – 28.02.2023
On February 5, 2003, ProjecteSD opened its doors. To celebrate these intense, long, and at the same time short 20 years, we devote February to a group exhibition that will develop and grow throughout the month. The artworks will be inserted on different dates and they will add one to the next until the show is completed, on the closing date.
All the participating artists are those who to date are part of ProjecteSD’s program, or with whom we have had a significant collaboration over these years. It is not an exhibition with a specific discourse or theme. The intention is not to look back, or to make any revision of the work done. The idea responds rather to the desire to break the rhythm, stop for a moment and search, through the works of the artists that are part of it, specific connections with moments of these 20 years. Fragments of a process that began in 2003 and continues. A free, simple exhibition, done in parts, where one can find a certain imbalance or even a certain eccentricity. And that hides little stories, that we invite you to discover throughout the month of February.
Curated by Silvia Dauder
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Private view 24 October 2022 at Banco de España Gallery, Madrid
FLORES Y FRUTOS
25.10.2022 – 25.02.2023
Floral and fruit motifs have been part of the iconography of the Bank of Spain since it was founded in 1782. Symbols such as the cornucopia or horn of plenty, which since ancient times have sponsored prosperity and celebrated generosity, are not only present in banknotes’ decorations, bank’s shares and administrative documents, but also repeated in the sculptural decorations on the facades and interiors of its own buildings and in the stained glass windows that cover some of the Bank's spaces.
Exhibition curated by Yolanda Romero
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Private view 7 May 2022 at Galeria ProjecteSD, Barcelona
PETITE PLANÈTE
7.05.2022 – 29.07.2022
The exhibition Petite Planète is inspired by Chris Marker's collection of travel books published by Éditions du Seuil between 1954 and 1964. According to Marker, Petite Planète was "Not a guide book, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveller's impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us."
Contributions by Iñaki Bonillas, Helena Civit, Collection Petite Planète, Patricia Dauder, Dora García, Ana Jotta, Jochen Lempert, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Matt Mullican, Xavier Ribas, Eduardo Ruiz and Danh Vō.
Exhibition curated by Silvia Dauder.
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Private view 26 January 2022 at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol
INTERSECTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES
27.01.2022 – 03.04.202
"Intersectional Geographies brings together a diverse selection of photographers whose works address inclusion within society at a time of climate crisis, social distancing and human rights violations. Each photographer highlights a concern that resonates with them."
Partcipant artists: Ignacio Acosta, Rhiannon Adam, Lisa Barnard, Jacqueline Ennis-Cole, Darek Fortas, Roshini Kempadoo, Miranda Pennell, Judy Rabinowitz Price, Xavier Ribas, David Severn, Aida Silvestri, Janine Wiedel. Curated by Jacqueline Ennis-Cole.
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Private view 22 October 2021 at CA2M, Móstoles, Madrid
DIALECT CA2M
23.10.2021 – 09.01.2022
More than 400 works by 250 artists come together in an exhibition that showcases the CA2M collections and takes up the entire museum space. It is a celebration of what the Museum represents and has represented from the beginning. This exhibition is not attributed to any one person because it should be thought of as a collective work of the museum, a product of the many people who have passed through it and the members of the successive acquisitions commissions of the Community of Madrid.
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Private view 22 October 2021 at Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Islas Canarias
REASEMBLAJE / REASSEMBLAGE
23.10.2021 – 09.01.2022
"The photographic practices that converge in this exhibition require us to turn the image into a question of knowledge and not one of illusion. To ask ourselves about images, to wonder where they come from and why they came into being, and to understand them as montage and discourse, given that the best way of thinking and understanding is precisely to start out from the practice of storytelling. The majority of photographic practices showcased here operate from the visualization of out-of-field zones: the invisible layers of history and the backstage behind dominant narratives where new encounters and chains of meanings are reassembled."
Artists include: Allan Sekula, Tacita Dean, Ana Mendieta, John Baldessari, Dornith Doherty, Emmet Gowin, Marine Hugonnier, Patricia Dauder, Axel Hütte, Fermín Jiménez Landa, Natalia Lassalle-Morillo, Manuel Martín González, Robert Adams, Edward Burtynsky, Xavier Ribas, Louise Purbrick, Ignacio Acosta, Gerhard Richter, Ansel Adams, Valentín Vallhonrat.
Curated by Teresa Arozena
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Private view 02 June 2021 at Fundación ICO, Madrid
IN SPAIN: PHOTOGRAPHY, SURVEYS, TERRITORIES, 1983-2009
02.06.2021 – 12.09.2021
En España. Fotografía, encargos, territorios, 1983-2009. Exhibition curated by Ramón Esparza, Jorge Ribalta and Cristina Zelich
Book covers photograps © Cesar González
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Private view 20 May 2021 at Bombas Gens, València
SCULPTING REALITY
21.05.2021 – 15.05.2022
Walker Evans, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Helen Levitt, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, Ricardo Rangel, David Goldblatt, Anthony Hernández, Mike Mandel, Lee Friedlander, Edward Ruscha, Xavier Ribas, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Lewis Baltz, Bleda y Rosa, Susan Meiselas, Tod Papageorge, Ian Wallace, Garry Winogrand.
Exhibition curated by Julia Castelló, Sandra Guimarães and Vicent Todolí.
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Private view 14 May 2021 at Espaço SP620, Bienal de Fotografia do Porto
TRAFFICKING THE EARTH
14.05.2021 – 26.06.2021
This exhibition is part of the official programme of the 2021 Bienal de Fotografia do Porto.
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Private view 24 March 2021 at the Taipei National Centre of Photography and Images, Taiwan
A HANDFUL OF DUST: FROM THE COSMIC TO THE DOMESTIC
25.03.2021 – 11.07.2021
A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction, and natural disasters, to urban decay, domestic dirt, and forensics, via abstraction and conceptual art. The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards, and film clips. Curated by David Campany.
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PARANGOLÉ, Issue nr 1: Motherland, January 2021. Published by Urban Think Tank, distributed by Hatje Kantz.
This first issue of Parangolé titled “Motherland” is concerned with people living in emergency shelters, camps, informal settlements, and those facing future economic hardship, conflict and violence. People on the move are facing specific challenges and vulnerabilities that must be identified and taken into consideration in urban planning and response. We are living in a moment of change, in which we notice the rise of a discussion around design on a local, micro scale and systems-level. This calls for contextualized and adaptive interventions to respond to specific situations. While this journal is being prepared for print, the COVID-19 pandemic engulfs the world, Black Lives Matter protests intensifies, and terrorist attacks continue. With Motherland we bring together researchers and practitioners, aiming to inspire collective efforts in thinking about and interacting with these issues, using a spatial lens.
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Private view 25 November 2020 CaixaForum, Barcelona
SOOOOOO LAZY. IN PRAISE OF SQUANDERING
26.11.2020 – 18.04.2021
"It's obviously a question of regarding laziness –or non-productive inactivity– not from an ethical point of view, where it is frowned upon, as in the classical reproach of parents to their children: “Don’t waste your time, make the most of it.” Sooooo Lazy proposes thinking about laziness in the light of economic theory and events we have been through in the last few years, including the recent experience of a pandemic that has forced our system to slow down. By suggesting a storyline that yearns for wasting time instead of using it productively and destroying wealth before accumulating it, the selected pieces propose a criticism of contemporary hyperactivity and introduce hope for a redistribution of resources and time to be able to rethink the norm.
To accept squandering as something necessary and propose a different use of our time inherently implies an urgent reduction of work and involves an alternative way of understanding communal life. Our guides in this project have been, on the one hand, Duchamp’s rejection of work; on the other, Russell’s praise of idleness and Lafargue and Malevich’s worship of laziness and, finally, Arendt’s reflections in The Human Condition."
Extract from Beatriz Escudero and Francesco Giavery, Soooooo Lazy: In Praise of Squandering, La Caixa Foundation, Palma 2020. ISBN: 978-84-9900-287-3.
Download exhibition catalogue [En] [Cas]
Works by Ângela Ferreira, Aernout Mik, Ignasi Aballí, Alberto Gil Casedas, Francesc Abad, Sharon Lockhart, Misha Bies Golas, Esther Ferrer, Agustín Parejo School, Constant, Priscila Fernandes, Xavier Ribas, Samuel Labadie, Camila Cañeque, Agnes Martin.
Exhibition curated by Beatriz Escudero and Francesco Giavery
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Private view 11 November 2020 CaixaForum, Palma de Mallorca
CÁMARA Y CIUDAD. LA VIDA URBANA ENTRE LA FOTOGRAFÍA Y EL CINE
11.09.2020 – 07.03.2021
The experience of the big city is part of the essential nature of our modernity. Throughout the 20th century, the metropolis acted not only as a social stage and political battlefield, but also as a wild playground. This exhibition on the Camera and the City is about the photographers and film makers who recorded, staged and dissected the city as they created different takes on urban life and culture. These narratives capture both the euphoria of the metropolis and the solitude of modern society, as well as conflict, war, reconciliation, protest, change and self-affirmation in the street. There are stories about the rise of the growing city and the melancholy of the shrinking city, encounters with others and the surveillance of citizens in the global village of our digital age.
This is the first time that major works from different collections at the Centre Pompidou —the departments of photography, experimental cinema, new media and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky—have been shown in dialogue with photographs and films from Spanish collections. We hope that this exhibition offers a valuable insight into how the camera helped shape the idea of urban life.
Exhibition curated by Florian Ebner, with Marta Dahó
Exhibition catalogue
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Louis Rogers, Interview with Xavier Ribas. TANK Magazine, Infrastructure Issue 84 September 2020 [PDF]
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Private view 15 September 2020 at ProjecteSD, Barcelona
THE IMAGINARY MUSEUM
10.09.2020 – 14.11.2020
Xavier Ribas, Afterlife #5 [Giant, Altar of Zeus, Pergamon]. Installation photograph: ProjecteSD / Roberto Ruiz
Works by Patricia Dauder, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Dora García, Daan Van Golden, Ana Jotta, Jochen Lempert, Marc Nagtzaam, Peter Piller, Xavier Ribas, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. Curated by Silvia Dauder
Watch guided tour here: [En] [Cast]
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Private view 07 July 2020 at CaixaForum, Madrid
CÁMARA Y CIUDAD. LA VIDA URBANA ENTRE LA FOTOGRAFÍA Y EL CINE
08.07.2020 – 12.10.2020
Installation photograph © Fernando Maquieira
The experience of the big city is part of the essential nature of our modernity. Throughout the 20th century, the metropolis acted not only as a social stage and political battlefield, but also as a wild playground. This exhibition on the Camera and the City is about the photographers and film makers who recorded, staged and dissected the city as they created different takes on urban life and culture. These narratives capture both the euphoria of the metropolis and the solitude of modern society, as well as conflict, war, reconciliation, protest, change and self-affirmation in the street. There are stories about the rise of the growing city and the melancholy of the shrinking city, encounters with others and the surveillance of citizens in the global village of our digital age.
This is the first time that major works from different collections at the Centre Pompidou —the departments of photography, experimental cinema, new media and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky—have been shown in dialogue with photographs and films from Spanish collections. We hope that this exhibition offers a valuable insight into how the camera helped shape the idea of urban life.
Exhibition curated by Florian Ebner, with Marta Dahó
Exhibition catalogue
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Private view 19 June 2020 Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Tenerife
THE WILLOW SEES THE HERON’S IMAGE UPSIDE DOWN
20.06.2020 – 04.10.2020
A landscape is always a construction, a way of seeing or a representation, or all these things at once. It is a framing of the gaze, which is trained to see in a certain way. The landscape is an exercise in appropriation, in moulding what we have learned to call nature in order to separate ourselves from it as humans1. When we try to depict it, and not communicate with it, through art, we create technologies of separation and distancing. We are constantly caught in the contradictions of this back-and-forth process.
Landscape is, in consequence, a political tool for the construction of subjectivities and of military and economic targets. At the same time, it affords a setting for contemplation in which we can project our own ghosts and those of others. There is no such thing as an unbiased observer.
Works by: Berenice Abbott, Adrián Alemán, Bleda & Rosa, Santiago Borja, Brassaï, Carolina Caycedo, Wilson Díaz, Patricia Esquivias, Harun Farocki, Trino Garriga Abreu, Dan Graham, Michele Horrigan, Marine Hugonnier, Hector Hyppolite, Isuma, Patrick Keiller, Teresa Lanceta, Janelle Lynch, Sean Lynch, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Britta Marakatt-Labba, Carme Nogueira, Tania Pérez Córdova, Peter Piller, Xavier Ribas, Xabier Salaberria, Amaia Urra, Emma Wolukau-Wanambwa.
Exhibition curated by Catalina Lozano
Curator's text [En] [Cas]
Curator's podcast [Cas]
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Private view 21 January 2020 at Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto
A HANDFUL OF DUST: FROM THE COSMIC TO THE DOMESTIC
22.01.2020 – 05.04.2020
A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction, and natural disasters, to urban decay, domestic dirt, and forensics, via abstraction and conceptual art. The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards, and film clips. Curated by David Campany [Installation photograph: James Morley].
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Private view 30 October 2019 at CaixaForum, Barcelona
CÀMERA i CIUTAT. LA VIDA URBANA ENTRE LA FOTOGRAFIA i EL CINEMA
31.10.2019 – 31.03.2020
The experience of the big city is part of the essential nature of our modernity. Throughout the 20th century, the metropolis acted not only as a social stage and political battlefield, but also as a wild playground. This exhibition on the Camera and the City is about the photographers and film makers who recorded, staged and dissected the city as they created different takes on urban life and culture. These narratives capture both the euphoria of the metropolis and the solitude of modern society, as well as conflict, war, reconciliation, protest, change and self-affirmation in the street. There are stories about the rise of the growing city and the melancholy of the shrinking city, encounters with others and the surveillance of citizens in the global village of our digital age.
This is the first time that major works from different collections at the Centre Pompidou —the departments of photography, experimental cinema, new media and the Bibliothèque Kandinsky—have been shown in dialogue with photographs and films from Spanish collections. We hope that this exhibition offers a valuable insight into how the camera helped shape the idea
of urban life.
Exhibition curated by Florian Ebner, with Marta Dahó.
Exhibition catalogue
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Private view 17 October 2019 at CDAN, Huesca
EL TRÁFICO DE LA TIERRA
18.10.2019 – 18.02.2020
Trafficking the Earth is a collaboration between photographers Xavier Ribas, Ignacio Acosta and an art historian, Louise Purbrick. Their collective research has documented the movement of mineral wealth of Chile into global markets and European landscapes. Nitrate and copper is their focus. The transformation of these natural resources into industrial materials draw desert and city, slag heap and country house, ruin and regeneration, landscape and archive, Chile and Britain, into the same circuit of capital. Over the last five years Acosta, Purbrick and Ribas have encountered other artists, photographers, curators, translators and activists and worked alongside them sharing a concern with politics of documenting the inequalities of extractive industries. Trafficking the Earth is a collection of documents that reproduces historical constellations of appropriation and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by mining nitrate and copper.
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Lutsky K, Salooje O, Scott EE, Viscosity—Mobilizing Materialities. University of Minnesota, 2019
"This volume, inspired by the 2017 World of Matter: Mobilizing Materialities exhibition and symposium at the University of Minnesota, features four essays that investigate territorial transformations in sites of extreme extraction – from the Argentinian coast to Saudi Arabian and North Dakotan oil-fields to the Earth’s oceanic depths and icy poles ... Viscosity—Mobilizing Materialities evokes alternatives – including those already detectible in social movements and indigenous cosmologies – to the petrocapitalis world we inhabit, characterized as it is by the rampant commodification, exploitation, and dispossession of humans and nonhumans alike. It imagines realities beyond the extractive view, with aesthetic experimentation being one way to get there."
Read book HERE
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Private view 16 February 2019 at El Borsí, Barcelona
SETZE BARRIS, MIL CIUTATS
17.02.2019 – 17.05.2019
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Setze Barris; Mil Ciutats. The exhibition brings together a selection of images from sixteen photographic projects developed between July and December of 2018 as part of a group commission by Foment de Ciutat to document sixteen low-income districts in Barcelona. The commissioned works will be housed at the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona. Curated by Marta Dahó and Marta Delclòs.
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Private view 07 February 2019 at The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver
A HANDFUL OF DUST: FROM THE COSMIC TO THE DOMESTIC
08.02.2019 – 28.04.2019
A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction, and natural disasters, to urban decay, domestic dirt, and forensics, via abstraction and conceptual art. The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards, and film clips. Curated by David Campany.
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Private view 15 December 2018 at Sala de Máquinas, Santiago, Chile
GEOGRAFÍAS CONCRETAS
16.12.2018 – 20.03.2019
The exhibition presents ten Concrete Geographies works produced between 2003 and 2009. The exhibition format, which is designed especially for this occasion, refers to the figure of the 'contact sheet', a concept inherited from analogue photography, where by contact the negative strips are arranged on photosensitive paper, and thus create a view of each of the images contained in the entire film sequence. These ten enlarged 'contact sheets' are a documentation of the original works, they are an 'echo' of them, a catalogue of sorts. This arrangement allows the presentation of the complete Concrete Geographies series in the specific gallery space of Sala de Máquinas.
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Private view 03 October 2018 at Fondazione MAST Bologna
PENDULUM. MOVING GOODS MOVING PEOPLE
04.10.2018 – 13.01.2019
MAST Foundation presents a new selection of works from its collection of photographs, video-installations, and photo-albums on industry and labour. A multifaceted reflection on the theme of speed characterising today’s society, the exhibition, which has the pendulum as its visual metaphor, illustrates the contrasting energies issued from two phenomena that dominate our present: on the one hand, the unbridled power of engines, an enormous increase in speed, means of transport transformed into the fetish of our times, permanent connection as an absolute necessity; and on the other, a slowing down, a sharp braking, a barrier to the flows of migrating people, the only limit to the myth of global mobility. Curated by Urs Stahel. [Installation photograph: Ulrich Gebert]
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Private view 06 July 2018 at California Museum of Photography, Riverside
A HANDFUL OF DUST
07.07.2018 – 09.12.2018
A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction, and natural disasters, to urban decay, domestic dirt, and forensics, via abstraction and conceptual art. The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards, and film clips. Curated by David Campany.
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Private view 14 March 2018 at Bombas Gens, València
THE PULSE OF THE BODY. USES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF SPACE
14.03.2018 – 20.01.2019
This exhibition is the second public presentation of works from the collection Per Amor a l’Art. The exhibition brings together a selection of works, by many artists and from different times and countries, that offers an insight into the social construction of space, the ways in which we represent, reproduce, know or inhabit places. Curated by Nuria Enguita.
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Private view 2 March 2018 at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona
MACHINES FOR LIVING. FLAMENCO AND ARCHITECTURE IN THE OCCUPATION AND VACATING OF SPACES
03.03.2018 – 20.05.2018
This exhibition traces historical genealogy of the ways of situating oneself in the modern space, architecture and urbanism, developed between the middle of the 20th century and the present day. Our era has turned living into an administered manner of dwelling. This formula needs turning back to front to make living a political mode of dwelling in the world. Curated by Pedro G. Romero and María García.
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01.2018 NEW BOOK – TRAFFICKING THE EARTH. Intuitive Editions/Editorial Gronefot, London/Santiago
Intuitive Editions/Editorial Gronefot, London/Santiago, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9932245-3-9
96 pages, 25.5 x 20.2 cm, unbound
Spanish and English
Published on the occasion of the exhibition Trafficking the Earth at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo [MAC], Santiago, Chile, 08.09.2017 – 12.11.2017.
This publication is a 'folded exhibition' specially produced to distribute free among Chilean environmental activists, pressure groups, lawyers and school teachers in mining communities. If you would like to receive one please let me know.
For more information about this publication, to see inside, and to download a PDF go to Traces of Nitrate website HERE
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Private view 8 November 2017 at Bòlit, Centre d'Art Comtemporani, Girona
FOTOGRAFIES COM A ESPAI PÚBLIC
09.11.2017 – 21.01.2018
LC (2003) at Bòlit Centre d’Art Contemporani © Rita Andreu
This exhibition has two fundamental objectives. Firstly, it presents pieces that have become part of the Col·lecció Nacional de Fotografia de la Generalitat de Catalunya (National Photography Collection of the Government of Catalonia) over the past three years and that are currently preserved in several institutions: MNAC, MACBA, the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona (Photographic Archive of Barcelona) and the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (National Archive of Catalonia). On the other hand, it invites us to reflect on the experience that photography puts into play as a set of practices and languages that constitute a space in which everyone engages in different ways. Curated by Marta Dahó.
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Private view 8 November 2017 at Centre d'Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona
FOTOGRAFIES COM A ESPAI PÚBLIC
09.11.2017 – 21.01.2018
This exhibition has two fundamental objectives. Firstly, it presents pieces that have become part of the Col·lecció Nacional de Fotografia de la Generalitat de Catalunya (National Photography Collection of the Government of Catalonia) over the past three years and that are currently preserved in several institutions: MNAC, MACBA, the Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona (Photographic Archive of Barcelona) and the Arxiu Nacional de Catalunya (National Archive of Catalonia). On the other hand, it invites us to reflect on the experience that photography puts into play as a set of practices and languages that constitute a space in which everyone engages in different ways. Curated by Marta Dahó.
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Private view 19th October 2017 at CENTROCENTRO, Madrid
MÁQUINAS DE VIVIR. FLAMENCO Y ARQUITECTURA EN LA OCUPACIÓN Y DESOCUPACIÓN DE ESPACIOS
20.10.2017 – 04.02.2018
Máquinas de vivir. Flamenco y arquitectura en la ocupación y desocupación de espacios es un proyecto en torno al diálogo a tres bandas entre la arquitectura radical, la crítica social y las representaciones flamencas. Comisarios: Pedro G. Romero y María García.
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IMBALANCE, Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdańsk, Poland.
22.09.2017 - 11.11.2017
Imbalance aims to provoke reflections on the potential of art as a useful path for reviewing our conceptions regarding some present-day environmental problems. The exhibition’s approach implies the understanding that our conceptions of natural fact and reality have to be re-examined, on the basis that our current situation of “ecocide” results — either directly or indirectly— from the way in which we have instrumentalized our natural environment. Curated by Blanca de la Torre
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09.2017 – TRAFFICKING THE EARTH, a Traces of Nitrate installation of 336 photographs and texts, is now part of the collection of Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Chile.
Trafficking the Earth is a collaboration between photographers Xavier Ribas, Ignacio Acosta and an art historian, Louise Purbrick. Their collective research has documented the movement of mineral wealth of Chile into global markets and European landscapes. Nitrate and copper is their focus. The transformation of these natural resources into industrial materials draw desert and city, slag heap and country house, ruin and regeneration, landscape and archive, Chile and Britain, into the same circuit of capital. Over the last five years Acosta, Purbrick and Ribas have encountered other artists, photographers, curators, translators and activists and worked alongside them sharing a concern with politics of documenting the inequalities of extractive industries. Trafficking the Earth is a collection of documents that reproduces historical constellations of appropriation and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by mining nitrate and copper [Installation photograph: Gaspar Abrilot]
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Private view 14th September 2017 at Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
WORLD OF MATTER: MOBILIZING MATERIALITIES
14.09.2017 - 09.12.2017
Mobilizing Materialities brings together seven works produced by World of matter, an international art and media project investigating primary materials and complex ecologies in which they are embedded. World of Matter responds to the urgent need for new forms of representation that shift resource-related debates from a market driven domain to open platforms for engaged public discourse. [Installation photo: Frauke Huber]
See publication: Lutsky K, Salooje O, Scott EE, Viscosity—Mobilizing Materialities. University of Minnesota, 2019.
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Private view 7th September 2017 at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Universidad de Chile, Santiago
TRAFFICKING THE EARTH
08.09.2017 - 12.11.2017
Trafficking the Earth is a collaboration between photographers Xavier Ribas, Ignacio Acosta and an art historian, Louise Purbrick. Their collective research has documented the movement of mineral wealth of Chile into global markets and European landscapes. Nitrate and copper is their focus. The transformation of these natural resources into industrial materials draw desert and city, slag heap and country house, ruin and regeneration, landscape and archive, Chile and Britain, into the same circuit of capital. Over the last five years Acosta, Purbrick and Ribas have encountered other artists, photographers, curators, translators and activists and worked alongside them sharing a concern with politics of documenting the inequalities of extractive industries. Trafficking the Earth is a collection of documents that reproduces historical constellations of appropriation and accumulation, depletion and displacement, violence and its disguise, begun by mining nitrate and copper. [Installation photograph: Gaspar Abrilot]
Installation photo: Louise Oates
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Private view 30th August 2017 at the Galería ProjecteSD, Barcelona
ACCROCHAGE # 3: FOOTNOTE No. 10.
30.08.2017 - 16.09.2017
PATRICIA DAUDER, KOENRAAD DEDOBBELEER, HANS-PETER FELDMANN, DORA GARCÍA, ANA JOTTA,
GILDA MANTILLA & RAIMOND CHAVES, PETER PILLER, XAVIER RIBAS
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Private view 27th June 2017 at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Bordeaux
4.543 BILLION: THE MATTER of MATTER. Curated by Latitudes
28.06.2017 - 05.11.2017
Installation of A History of Detonations [left wall, top]. Photographs Courtesy: Latitudes/RK
With contributions from more than 30 artists, ‘4.543 billion. The matter of matter’ is an exhibition that addresses works of art, collections and cultural histories in relation to ecological processes and a geological scale of time. It presents a continuum of materials and temporal landscapes – films, works on paper, photographs, sculptures, documents, and other meaningful things – and springs from the CAPC building’s former life as a warehouse for colonial commodities whose limestone walls were once deep in the ground and whose wooden beams were once part of a forest.
More images HERE
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Private view 14th June 2017 at the Centro de Arte y Naturaleza, Huesca
EL BORDE DE UNA HERIDA. MIGRACION, EXILIO Y COLONIALIDAD EN EL ESTRECHO. Curated by Juan Guardiola
15.06.2017 - 24.09.2017
Concrete Geographies [Ceuta and Melilla Border Fences]
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06.2017 NEW BOOK – IT WOULD NEVER BE QUITE THE SAME AGAIN. Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona.
Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 2017
ISBN: 978-84-945596-4-8
12 pages, 29 x 39.5 cm, softbound
Three editions of 100 copies each in three languages [English, Spanish and Catalan], signed and numbered.
Artist book published on the occasion of the exhibition 1989. After the Conversations of Algiers. Delirium and Truce, curated by Carles Guerra, that took place at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz, from the 11th of August to the 16th of October 2016, and at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, from the 11th of November 2016 to the 15th of January 2017.
For more information about this publication go to Traces of Nitrate website HERE
To download PDFs of the text go to the project's page in this website.
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Private view 6th June 2017 at the Whitechapel Gallery, London
A HANDFUL OF DUST. A group exhibition curated by David Campany
07.06.2017 - 03.09.2017
A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction, and natural disasters, to urban decay, domestic dirt, and forensics, via abstraction and conceptual art. The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards, and film clips.
A limited edition print to support the Whitechapel Gallery is available for purchase HERE
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Private view 17th February 2017 at CentroCentro, Madrid
EL BORDE DE UNA HERIDA. MIGRACION EXILIO Y COLONIALIDAD EN EL ESTRECHO. Curated by Juan Guardiola
18.02.2017 - 04.06.2017 CentroCentro
[Installation photograph: Pilar Ortega]
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Private view 11th August 2016 at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz
Private view 11th November 2016 at Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
1989. AFTER THE CONVERSATIONS OF ALGIERS. DELIRIUM AND TRUCE. Curated by Carles Guerra
11.08.2016 - 01.11.2016 Artium
12.11.2016 - 15.01.2017 Fundació Antoni Tàpies
1989 After the Conversations of Algiers. Delirium and Truce is a case study exhibition within Pedro G. Romero's curatorial project 'Peace Treaty', organised as part of the Donosti 2016 European Capital of Culture. The exhibition is hosted by Artium in Vitoria-Gasteiz and by Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.
The “permanent ceasefire in armed violence” decreed by ETA in 2011 is the most recent and nearest example of the will to put an end to a period of history scarred by violence. Prior attempts to start a negotiated peace process, such as the Conversations of Algiers (1987-1989), which give this exhibition its title, did not conclude with any type of agreement. Despite all the meetings held between the Spanish government and ETA, peace has been repeatedly put off.
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Private view 30th June 2016 at Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela
STATE OF EXCEPTION / ESTADO DE EXCEPCIÓN. Curated by Santi Olmo
30.06.2016 - 02.10.2016
Works by Johan Grimonprez, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Locher, Walid Raad, Jaicer Salloum, Valentín Vallhonrat, Xavier Ribas, Eskö Männikkö and Ana Teresa Ortega. PDF
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Private view 23rd March 2016 at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona
BARCELONA. THE METROPOLIS IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY, 1860-2004. Curated by Jorge Ribalta
24.03.2016 - 25.09.2016
Group exhibition exploring the iconographic photography of Barcelona’s urban development across one and a half centuries of history. The show follows the link between urban transformation – marked by the celebration of various major international events, from the 1888 World Fair to the 2004 Universal Forum of Cultures – and the historic role of photography in shaping public opinion and the general perception of the city throughout this period. It takes us from the emergence of multiple forms of photography technology in the 1850s to the explosion of digital technologies, the Internet, mobile telephony and social media at the turn of the 21st century.
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Private view 20th November 2015 at Espai Visor, València
IT WOULD NEVER BE QUITE THE SAME AGAIN
20.11.2015 - 22.01.2016
[Exhibition poster PDF]
Review by Paloma Villalobos at Revista Atlas Imaginarios Visuales, diciembre 2015 [Pdf]
Review by José Luís Clemente in El Cultural, 18.12.2015 [Pdf]
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Private view 28th October 2015 at Museo Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona
NITRATE
28.10.2015 - 06.03.2016
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Private view 15th October 2015 at LE BAL, Paris
A HANDFUL OF DUST. A group exhibition curated by David Campany
16.10.2015 - 17.01.2016 Le Bal
Installation of NOMADS at LE BAL, Paris [Installation photograph: M. Arguroglo]
A Handful of Dust is a speculative history of the 20th century, tracing a visual journey through the imagery of dust from aerial reconnaissance, wartime destruction, and natural disasters, to urban decay, domestic dirt, and forensics, via abstraction and conceptual art. The exhibition features works by over 30 artists and photographers including John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington alongside magazine spreads, press photos, postcards, and film clips.
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08.2015 – NITRATE book, Bronze Laus Prize 2015
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07.2015 – NITRATE project joins WORLD OF MATTER, a multimedia project providing an open access archive on the global ecologies of resource exploitation and circulation.
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Private view 16th April 2015 at Galeria ProjecteSD, Barcelona
IT WOULD NEVER BE QUITE THE SAME AGAIN
11.04.2015 - 26.05.2015
Review by Ángela Molina at El País 02.05.2015 - [PDF]
Review by Max Andrews at FRIEZE 07.2015 - [PDF]
Exhibition poster designed by Xavier Ribas [PDF]
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Private view 10th April 2015 at the Bluecoat, Liverpool.
NITRATE
11.04.2015 - 05.07.2015
This extensive collection of photographic and moving image works made across 2009-14 charts the history of nitrate extraction in the Chilean Atacama Desert. A non-renewable natural resource, Nitrate was extensively mined in Northern Chile between the 1870s and 1920s, mostly by British companies who, in a relatively short space of time, transformed a portion of the Atacama Desert into an industrial landscape. Sodium nitrate was traded mainly as a natural fertiliser but it was also used in the manufacture of explosives; a crucial ingredient for the acceleration of both life and death.
A limited edition print to support the Bluecoat is available for purchase HERE
Review by Simon Denison [En]
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Private view 27th November 2014 at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (CAAC), Seville
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF LANDSCAPE
28.11.2014 - 29.03.2015
Invisible Structures I
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06.2014 NEW BOOK – NITRATE. Published by MACBA
176 pages, 23 x 31.5 cm. Softbound (jacket)
ISBN: 978-84-92505-66-1 (English edition)
ISBN: 978-84-92505-53-1 (Spanish edition)
Texts by: Carles Guerra, Louise Purbrick, Andrea Jösch, Max Jorge Hinderer,
Pablo Artaza, mabel Loomis Todd, and Alberto Martín.
Published by MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA [MACBA]
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Private view 4th June 2014 at the Museo d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA]
NITRATE
05.06.2014 - 12.10.2014
Installation views HERE and HERE
This is the first solo exhibition by Xavier Ribas (Barcelona, 1960) to bring together a substantial body of work made by the photographer over the last decade. The exhibition takes its title from his latest investigative project into nitrate extraction. The system of colonial exploitation led by British companies in the Chilean Atacama Desert is a case study whose geographical and historical scope is held to question by Ribas’s photographic practice. This ambitious study, produced between 2009 and 2014, is presented here for the first time along with a selection of his earlier works. The first part of the exhibition – which prefaces the section dedicated specifically to Nitrate – includes four photographs from the Sanctuary series, 2002, and eight series from the most extensive group of works in the artist’s career, Concrete Geographies, 2002–9. Exhibition curated by Carles Guerra.
Review by Laura Vallés at CONCRETA [En] - [Cast]
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THe PHOTOGRAPHER'S PLAYBOOK. 307 ASSIGNMENTS AND IDEAS
Edited by Jason Fulford and Gregory Halpern
"The Photographer’s Playbook features photography assignments, as well as ideas, stories, and anecdotes from many of the world’s most talented photographers and photography professionals."
Aperture, 2014. ISBN 978-1-59711-247-5
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Private view 30th May 2014 at the Espai d'Art Contemporani de Castelló [EACC]
VESTIGIOS INVISIBLES
30.05.2014 - 31.08.2014
A Unique and Inevitable Voice (2014)
La muestra Vestigios invisibles presenta los trabajos fotográficos de Mark Adams, Ana Teresa Ortega, Xavier Ribas, Ann Shelton y Vicente Tirado que son registros de unos territorios en donde acometieron acontecimientos de los cuales no quedan vestigios visibles que la fotografía pueda retratar. Estas fotografías ofrecen una reflexión sobre la representación del paisaje y su memoria.
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Private view 29th May 2014 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia [MNCARS]
PLAYGROUNDS. REINVENTING THE SQUARE
30.04.2014 - 22.09.2014
Sundays (1994-1997)
Through a selection of works from different time periods and in different mediums (paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, photographs, archive devices…), this exhibition analyses the socialising, transgressive and political potential of play when it appears linked to public space. The premise of Playgrounds is twofold: on one side, the popular tradition of carnival shows how the possibility of using recreational logic to subvert, reinvent and transcend exists, if only temporarily. On the other side, there has been two fundamental constants in utopian imagery throughout history: the vindication of the need for free time (countering work time, productive time) and the acknowledged existence of a community of shared property, with a main sphere of materialisation in public space.
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Private view 18th July 2013 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
ART, TWO POINTS
19.07.2013 - 06.01.2014
Sundays (1994-1997). Installation photograph: Rafel Vargas
The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and ”la Caixa” Foundation present for the first time in the city an unconventional story written with the art of today that questions the different episodes of agreements and disagreements between modernity and the avant-garde. While avant-garde and modernity have influenced and altered the conscience of the city since the late nineteenth century to the present, ART, TWO POINTS follows these tensions by confronting works and documents from the past with contemporary creations and new visual languages.
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Private view 7th June 2013 at 'Lo Pati' Centre d'Art Terres de l'Ebre
THE TELLING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS
08.06.2013 - 01.09.2013
LC (2002-2003)
The idea of landscape experiences a copernican revolution with the Oscar Wilde essay “The Decay of Lying”, published in 1891. It contains a very famous sentence: “Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life”, according to Alain Roger, one of the key contemporary thinkers on the subject, it represents a founding moment for a new interpretation of landscape as a cultural construction.
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Private view 24th May 2013 at the Treignac Project
O CHAIR / O FLESH
25.05.2013 - 29.09.2013
Nitrate_Caliche Fields (2010)
An international group exhibition that explores ideas of cultivation with particular reference to Georges Bataille's writings on the Lascaux caves. Artists include: Fabienne Audeoud, Fleur van Dodewaard, Christian Jankowski, Bea McMahon, Kaspar Oppen Samuelsen, Ria Pacquée, Xavier Ribas, Florian Roithmayr, John Russell, Allan Sekula, Morten Torgersrud, Francis Upritchard, Anne de Vries.
frieze, Issue 158, October 2013. Review of the exhibition Oh Chair Oh Flesh, curated by Matt Packer at Treignac Project, by Chris Fite-Wassilak [En]
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CONCRETA 01, Abril 2013 - DESPLAZAMIENTOS Y DESALOJOS
CONCRETE GEOGRAPHIES [NOMADS] - WITH AN ESSAY BY MATT PACKER
Concreta 01 recoge una serie de ensayos, conversaciones y proyectos que se aproximan a la idea de desplazamiento entendido no solo como traslación, movimiento u oscilación, sino como posicionamiento estético y político en la práctica artística contemporánea que investiga el territorio como lugar de lo común y espacio de diálogo, pero también como lugar de confrontación.
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NEW BOOK – CONCRETE GEOGRAPHIES [NOMADS] - Photo-Eye's Best Books of 2012
"Ribas's intimate exploration — of the rubble, monoliths and sharp edges found at an abandoned industrial site, where the once smooth concrete surface has been violently destroyed in order to prevent the sixty Gypsy families that once lived there from returning — is a sad but striking (and beautifully photographed) testament to displacement and discrimination, subtly discovered by Ribas within the shapes and forms of an easily overlooked contemporary landscape." Aaron Schuman.
84 pages
Page size_ 24 x 30 cm. / 9,5 x 11,7 in.
33 tritone B/W + 3 CMYK photographs
Paper_ Gardapat 13 Kiara 115 g
Hardbound_ cloth
Edition of 687 copies signed and numbered
ISBN_ 978-84-615-7229-8
Published by Bside Books, with the support of the University of Brighton
AVAILABLE from My Books Shop
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NEW BOOK – CONCRETE GEOGRAPHIES [CEUTA AND MELILLA BORDER FENCES]
As a response to their lack of visibility, these photographs intend to be statements towards a political cartography of the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla as the very edge of Europe. These two border fences are, perhaps, the contemporary public works that can best define, like monuments to inequality, the European landscape of the 21st century.
64 pages
Page size_ 20 x 16,5 cm.
33 colour + 14 b&w photographs
Soft bound_dust jacket
Text in Spanish only [Pdf English version available from this site]
ISBN_978-84-8081-325-9
Published by Universidad de Navarra
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Private view 30th March 2012 at the Centro Huarte de Arte Contemporáneo, Pamplona
LUGARES EN PÉRDIDA
30.03.2012 - 01.07.2012
Greenhouse (2007)
Lugares en pérdida permite iniciar un viaje que revisa los sueños utópicos de urbanismos idealizados y aborda las derivas de los escenarios naturales domesticados. Y lo hace a través de la visión de Adrian Paci, Aleksandra Mir, Aleksander Komarov, Beate Gütschow, Caio Reisewitz, Carlos Garaicoa, David Maljkovic, Ibon Aranberri, Ignasi Aballí, Jeremiah Day, Jonathan Hernández, Jorge Macchi, Lara Almarcegui, Lynne Cohen, Marine Hugonnier, Mireya Masó, Patricia Dauder, Paulo Catrica, Raimond Chaves y Gilda Mantilla, Tacita Dean, Xavier Ribas, María Bleda y José María Rosa, y Carlos Irijalba. Una nueva topografía en la que las experiencias, vestigios, posesiones, conjeturas y fracasos componen unos escenarios donde, a menudo, no se distingue lo interno de lo externo, la identidad y el poder, la realidad y la narración y donde el pasado resuena en el futuro. En palabras, de Teresa Blanch, "los lugares han devenido asuntos socio-políticos y bio-políticos, enredados en la trama de sus propias arqueologías e ideologías, que los artistas ponen en revisión."
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Private view 31st january 2012 at the Alhóndiga Bilbao
TOPOGRAFIAS DE LA MEMORIA. Fotografías de la Colección Ordóñez-Falcón.
01.02.2012 - 15.04.20-12
Sundays (1994-1997)
Topografías de la Memoria nos acerca a obras de referencia de algunos de los más destacados fotógrafos y artistas visuales, aquellos que con su mirada, han establecido las bases conceptuales de la fotografía contemporánea y de la vídeo-creación. El relato, el itinerario visual, la superposición de geografías tanto personales como públicas, etc. delimitan los contornos de los diversos escenarios de la memoria. Pese a lo breve del período aquí recogido, en su mayoría obras producidas en los últimos 30 años, y de estar enmarcadas dentro de lo que constituye el corpus de una colección, sorprende encontrarse en esta muestra colectiva con buena parte de las tendencias y prácticas discursivas que han marcado en el devenir de la creación artística actual.
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Private view January 30th 2012 at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
THE INVERTED MIRROR. Art from the Collection of 'La Caixa' Foundation and MACBA
31.01.2012 - 02.09.2012
Sundays (1994-1997)
The Inverted Mirror presents both Barcelona-based collections together outside of their respective venues for the first time. This survey of art from the late 1940s to the present includes painting, sculpture, photography, and video and is organized into six thematic sections: Dau Al Set and El Paso Group; Function and Reenactment in Photography: Landschaft; Function and Reenactment in Photography: The Self and the Other; The Limits of Performance; The Inverted Mirror; and Levity, Gravity, and Other Impossibilities.
The Inverted Mirror @ Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
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Private view 8th Nov 2011 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
VOLUME! Works from the Collection of 'La Caixa' Foundation and Macba
09.11.2011 - 23.04.2012
Habitus (2007)
Volume! proposes an interpretation of the transition from the 20th to the 21st century based on a paradigm shift in the art in terms of materials, sensory aspects and programme. Questioning the clichés that identify the 80s with the supremacy of painting, the exhibition places the pre-eminence of sculpture and photography at the centre of change at the turn of the new century.
Curated by Bartomeu Marí
Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art - MACBA
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Private view 8th July 2011 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam
CULTURED NATURE
09.07.2011 - 31.07.2011
Greenhouse (2007)
The relationship between humans and nature has been a source of inspiration for many generations of artists. Organized around recently acquired works by Persijn Broersen & Margit Lukács (photo), Zachary Formwalt and Xavier Ribas, Cultured Nature presents video, photography and sculpture expressing very different visions and representations of the artistic genre of landscape and the cultivation of nature. Artist duo Broersen & Lukács plunge the viewer into a constructed romantic landscape, while Formwalt critically addresses the connection between picturesque city parks and press and media images. In his video installation, Xavier Ribas shows how food production has radically redefined the landscape of West Friesland.
Shown alongside these three acquisitions is a selection of works from the collection in which artists construct, analyze and idealize nature and landscape. Cultured Nature traces the development of this theme from the 1970s to the present day. Included are Gilbert & George (who often picture themselves against the backdrop of the English landscape), as well as Adam Bartos, Ania Bien, Jan Dibbets, Richard Long and Robert Smithson. A section of the exhibition also highlights contemporary photography by Wout Berger, Jitka Hanzlová, Torbjørn Rødland, Johannes Schwartz and Wolfgang Tillmans.
Cultured Nature is an associative selection of works from the collection that envision the inspiring, capricious, contradictory and playful relationship between nature and culture. Curated by Hripsimé Visser.
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Private view 10th March 2011 at Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona
1979. A MONUMENT TO RADICAL INSTANTS
11.03.2011 - 12.06.2011
"Curated by Carles Guerra and conceived as a ‘historical essay’, ‘1979, a Monument to Radical Moments’ is inspired by Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance (1975–81), a three-volume novel set between 1937 and 1945, which addresses the transformative power of culture. Like Weiss’s book, Guerra’s exhibition, which includes the work of 70 practitioners, concentrates on the confluence between art, politics and the worker via art, film, photojournalism, propaganda, archival material and everyday objects such as Billy, the shelf designed by Gillis Lundgren for IKEA in 1979. Guerra has treated every object on display equally, including reproduced art works and facsimiles of documents, embracing Weiss’s engagement with the ‘poor image’ manifested in the explorations by the novel’s characters of art works only available through reproductions." [Frieze review by Anna Colin]
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Private view 16th Novembre 2010 at the Jerwood Space, London
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE
17.11.2010 - 12.12.2010
Nomads (2008)
With projects from Dakar, Barcelona, Shanghai, Dresden, California and London, This Must Be the Place, part of the Jerwood Encounters series, highlights the importance of location for today’s photography. As art reinvents itself as a context for experimental documentary practices, David Campanyi has brought together an international range of artistsii making work in a variety of forms: digital slideshows, films, composites, artists’ books, installation, photographic sequences, image/text and imagery derived from the internet. Whether surveying a city for its specific character, unearthing a hidden past, speculating on the future, or looking at the effects of globalization on particular sites, This Must Be the Place is a timely assessment of how we understand locality, and a suggestive indication of the place of photography in contemporary art.
Featuring works by: Camille Fallet, Mimi Mollica, Xavier Ribas, Eva Stenram, Lillian Wilkie, Tereza Zelenkova and David Campany.
Curated by David Campany
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Private view 17th September 2010 at the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo [CA2M], Madrid
BEFORE EVERYTHING
18.09.2010 - 09.01.2011
MMDCCLXI A.V.C (2008)
Before Everything is an attempt to delve into current artistic production from Spain. The exhibition, in which 56 artists will participate, will occupy the Center in its entirety. Undertaken by the exhibition’s curators Aimar Arriola and Manuela Moscoso, the selection does not set out to offer a totalizing vision of the here and now of Spanish art, but rather to confer an unprecedented level of visibility to productive modalities that have developed in specific locations in Spain; it will attend to the diversity of languages and ways of making art that have characterized the last 20 years. The recent change of decade offers an opportune moment to formulate an exploration of what’s to come and to take a look at the languages and ways of operating that have marked recent art.
Curated by: Aimar Arriola and Manuela Moscoso
Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo [CA2M]
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Private view 20th June 2010 at Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona
LC. A DEFERRED UTOPIA
21.06.2009 - 05.09.2009
LC (2002-2003)
Xavier Ribas documented the state of La Catalana neighbourhood over the course of 2002 and 2003. Urban decay and the systematic abandonment of public services had turned the area into a semi-functioning ruin. The twenty-two photographs that form his LC series show a devastated territory in its death throes. The exhibition is accompanied by historical documentation, videos and maps.
Curated by Carles Guerra. Documentation: Carmen Cazalla
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Private view 9th June 2010 at the Museo de la Ciudad, Madrid
PROFECIAS. Un diálogo entre la fotografía española del siglo XIX y autores contemporáneos
11.06.2010 - 25.07.2010
Ceuta Border Fence (2009)
La exposición Profecías, un proyecto del Fondo Fotográfico de la Universidad de Navarra, es un diálogo entre el origen y el presente de la fotografía. La muestra incluye un centenar de fotografías del siglo XIX -obras maestras de la fotografía española-, y los desarrollos fotográficos de 13 autores contemporáneos que han creado nuevas obras a partir de una revisión de estas piezas.
Joan Fontcuberta, Roland Fischer, Bleda & Rosa, Lynne Cohen, Sergio Belinchón, Xavier Ribas, Jordi Bernadó, o Gabriele Basilíco son algunos de los autores que han construido su propio diálogo con la fotografía del siglo XIX, escogiendo para ello álbumes, autores o temas presentes en la colección histórica del Fondo Fotográfico, y subrayando en numerosas ocasiones el carácter profético o anticipador de los pioneros de la fotografía.
Curated by: Rafael Levenfeld and Valentín Vallhonrat
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Private view 7th October 2009 at Belfast Exposed. Belfast, Northern Ireland
HABITUS
08.10.2009 - 24.11.2009
A solo exhibition by Catalan photographer Xavier Ribas, held jointly at Belfast Exposed and PLACE. The exhibition focuses on recent work presented in grid format and draws on Ribas’ longstanding interest in urban structure, archaeology and anthropology. The exhibition is presented in the context of Belfast Exposed’s ongoing examination of the city through archive and gallery projects, which explore social and political currents in ‘post conflict’ Belfast and the complex relationships between past and present, inscribed on public, private and commercial spaces.
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Private view 29th September 2009 at the Stanley Picker Gallery, London
STRANGE PLACES
30.09.2009 - 21.10.2009
Thresholds (2001-2002)
Strange Places brings together 11 international contemporary artists who propose an alternative mapping of the globalized urban condition. Whether gazing at ambiguous thresholds on the edges of the city, or tracing liminal spaces in its centre, these photographs explore themes of place, identity, boundaries and the uneasy encounter between land and built environment. The images do not capture urban life as action, but meditate on the spaces where it unfolds. What arises from this observation of traces and aftermath is a poetic quality hinting at the potential beauty of the most unlikely places.
Curated by Alexandra Stara
Stanley Picker Gallery, Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture. Kingston University
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Private view 12th June 2009 at the George Eastman House, Rochester
Private view 9th September 2009 at the Aperture Gallery, New York
NATURE AS ARTIFICE. New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art
George Eastman House 13.06.2009 - 16.08.2009
Aperture Gallery 10.09.2009 - 29.10.2009
Greenhouse (2007)
Nature As Artifice places a new image of the Dutch landscape over and against the old ̂‘DutchDuyt Dutch landscape that is familiar chiefly from 17th century Dutch painting. Nature As Artifice stimulates the formation of a new mental image of a landscape which has changed radically in its function over the last century, and has thus also altered in its appearance.
The Netherlands boasts excellent landscape photographers who have thoroughly and competently examined the landscape over the last three decades, visualising it in an inspired manner in photography (and an occasional video work). They have in common their interest in the changing ways that the Dutch shape and use their landscape, coupled with a new manner of photographing and filming. Nature As Artifice is the first survey of their work, in the form of an exhibition and a book, both the result of extensive research. This research was financed in part by a research grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).
Curated by Maartje van den Heuvel
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Private view 14th May 2009 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
TIME AS MATTER. MACBA Collection. New acquisitions 22
15.05.2009 - 31.08.2009
Sundays (1994-1997). Installation photograph: Tony Coll
The exhibition features a presentation of the priority lines of interest and research at the MACBA in this new stage, initiated in 2008. While over recent years the Collection has started to gather together documents that function as works of art (Grup de Treball, Tucumán Arde (Tucuman is Burning), works by collectives of artists and activists and so on), this has not implied forgoing the collection of great works by significant artists of our time. Alongside the abundance of fragments, it is important to consolidate nuclei of singular and complementary works that can express discourses on the nature of artistic creation and the historical moment in which we live. The MACBA is ideally placed to build a collection which explains the passing from the 20th to the 21st century, which begins with formulations of the final utopias of the last century and speaks of its crises, and then follows the present century, with its complexities and contradictions.
Curated by: Bartomeu Marí and Antònia Maria Perelló
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA]
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Private view 22nd October 2008 at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [MACBA]
UNIVERSAL ARCHIVE. The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia
23.10.2008 - 06.01.2009
Habitus (2007)
This exhibition analyses the idea of a document in the history of photography on the basis of the study and staging of a number of debates about the genre during the 20th century. With the aim of assessing various hypotheses about the meanings and mechanisms of the documentary, it traces a historical itinerary that gets under way with the beginning of the hegemony of photography in the illustrated press in the first third of the 20th century, before arriving at the purported crisis of photographic realism in the digital era at the end of the century. For all that, the exhibition is not a history of the genre, nor does it exhaust its possible definitions, but instead attempts to study how the photographic document has been constituted — in a consistently ambivalent and polemical way — in certain historical contexts.
Curated by Jorge Ribalta
Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA]
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Private view 11th June 2008 at the Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo
Private view 21st October 2008 at the Neue Pinakhotek, München
NATURE AS ARTIFICE. New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art
Kröller Müller Museum 12.06.2008 - 28.09.2008
Neue Pinakhotek 21.10.2008 - 18.01.2009
Greenhouse (2007)
Nature As Artifice places a new image of the Dutch landscape over and against the old ̂‘DutchDuyt Dutch landscape that is familiar chiefly from 17th century Dutch painting. Nature As Artifice stimulates the formation of a new mental image of a landscape which has changed radically in its function over the last century, and has thus also altered in its appearance.
The Netherlands boasts excellent landscape photographers who have thoroughly and competently examined the landscape over the last three decades, visualising it in an inspired manner in photography (and an occasional video work). They have in common their interest in the changing ways that the Dutch shape and use their landscape, coupled with a new manner of photographing and filming. Nature As Artifice is the first survey of their work, in the form of an exhibition and a book, both the result of extensive research. This research was financed in part by a research grant from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB).
Curated by Maartje van den Heuvel
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Private view 22nd July 2008 at the Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporaneo [CGAC], Santiago de Compostela
LA SOMBRA DE LA HISTORIA
23.7.2008 - 05.10.2008
Invisible Structures II (2006)
No es la primera vez que nos topamos con el concepto de archivo y documento como espina dorsal de un proyecto expositivo, en tanto que referencian historia, memoria, pasado, consolidan presente y catapultan futuro. Aunque sí nos encontramos con una orquestación diferente siguiendo el discurso del propio proyecto de La Sombra de la historia. Los contextos que vienen, el proyecto que completa la trilogía (consecutiva en años desde 2006) del Proxecto-Edición que podemos ver en el Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo estos primeros meses del año. Se reflexiona también sobre la manipulación del archivo y la construcción de realidad, sobre la autoría, la veracidad y crédito totalitarista de imágenes que nuestro ojo obliga a nuestro cerebro a creer, el almacenamiento y la difusión de documentos, la edición de los mismos o el exceso no sólo cuantitativo, sino cualitativo.
Curated by Manuel Olveira
Centro Gallego de Arte Contemporáneo [CGAC]
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Private view 9th May 2007 at the Fundació Espais, Girona
PAISAJES INVISIBLES / PARAJES IMPOSIBLES
10.05.2007 - 23.06.2007
Invisible Structures I (2006)
Invisible is everything that is not perceptible through sight. Invisible also refers to what is imperceptible to our way of looking. Therefore a dual condition of invisibility emerges: that which has to do with sight, the physical incapacity to perceive some of the rays of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that which has to do with our way of looking, how our conceptual, cultural, psychological and personal baggage impedes us from seeing certain things. The works that make up this exhibition move between these two extremes.
Curated by Lluís Sabadell i Artiga
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Private view 1st November 2007 at the Lewis Gluckman Gallery, Cork
BEYOND THE COUNTRY. Perspectives of the Land in Historic and Contemporary Art
02.11.2007 - 02.03.2008
Invisible Structures II (2006)
How does landscape relate to land? Do they refer to the same thing? How can representations of the land or the countryside carry positive and/or negative implications? Juxtaposing 19th and early 20th century paintings with contemporary art, the exhibition Beyond the country examines different ideas of the land and presents new ways of approaching its visual codes.
Curated by René Zechlin and Matt Packer.