Opening of the exhibition No Exit

No Exit. The Impact of Predatory Economies is the result of a research project on current violences and their representation. It examines the commitment of images to events and analyzes some of the strategies employed by artists and photographers to make these violences visible and provoke reactions from viewers.

The starting point is the concept of necropolitics developed by Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe, who has studied the forms extreme violences take in our times through political and bureaucratic systems that manage the death of people as an asset and decide who must die. He describes them as forms of violence aimed at massacring civilians and the primary exploitation of things; such as the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism that operates through market orders, which function by destroying the planet and its inhabitants, starting with the excluded people.

If in the mid-20th century the Holocaust represented a crisis of representation for photography and cinema, which had to reassess their relationship with history and their role as memory, today, in light of the violences of the 21st century, artists and photographers are seeking strategies to connect with viewers and maintain a critical perspective on the events that involve them, without making them look away.

The exhibition includes the experimental documentary Insurgent Flows. TransDecolonial and Black Marxist Futures* by Marina Gržinić and Tjaša Kancler, as well as works such as Virus (2020) by Antoine d’Agata; Mar de luto (2022) by Anna Surinyach, Our Bodies Have Turned to Gold (2018) by Kristiina Koskentola; Affannosa lotta per strappare alla morte (2022) by Alán Carrasco, and One in three women (2022) by Nieves Mingueza.

Exhibition dates: April 10 – June 8

Curated by Mercè Alsina.

With the participation of: Alán Carrasco, Antoine d’Agata, Nieves Mingueza, Anna Surinyach, Kristiina Koskentola, Marina Gržinić, and Tjaša Kancler.