Blanca de la Torre — Fountainhead

Blanca de la Torre_Foto Pedro Albornoz.jpg

Curator and Art Critic
León, Spain

October 29 - November 5, 2018

Biography

From 2009-2014, she acted as Chief Curator at ARTIUM, the Contemporary Museum of the Basque Country, Spain. Afterwards, she has curated exhibitions worldwide: MoCAB, Belgrade; Salzburger Kunstverein (co-curated with Zoran Eric and Seamy Kelly) : EFA Project Space, New York; Centro de las Artes, Monterrey, Museo Carrillo Gil Mexico city; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca; NC-Arte, Bogotá; RAER, Rome; LAZNIA, Gdansk, Poland, Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid and MUSAC in León, where she also takes part of the advisory board of the museum.

Statement

Elaborating on an approach closely related to eco-aesthetics I understand art as an instrument of knowledge, through which we can rethink and reformulate other possibilities of commonality and more sustainable strategies to relate to our specific context.

Political Ecology, cultural hybridization processes and alternative formats of social organization, as well as iterations of these thematic guidelines, are the vanishing points that my recent curatorial projects have explored in depth, building upon an asymmetrical approach to a liminal territory in which contemporary art is conceived as a device for critical visibilization.

Formally, I have been specially focused on Videoart and New Media, as well as Experimental formats that alter and transgress established codes of exhibition making or art writing, exploring non-traditional expanded forms of any type of linguistic I consider pertinent to my curatorial practice.

Before 2009, she curated exhibitions internationally in cities such as New York, Prague, London and Madrid. From 2009 to 2014, she acted as Chief Curator at ARTIUM, Basque Museum-Center of Contemporary Art (Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain) During her tenure, she conceived new exhibition programs as PRAXIS, based in Recycling, process-oriented practices and DIY culture, which featured more than fifteen international artists and also the site-specific project series Grey Flag and Mutatis Mutandis.

Between 2014 and 2016, she curated shows at the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas in Madrid, Spain; in New York at the Elisabeth Foundation Project Space and at Y Gallery (New York); in Mexico at Centro de las Artes, Monterrey, Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca; in Colombia at NC-Arte, Bogotá and the group show PIGS in Spain and Porto.

She also co-curated the exhibition trilogy Invisible Violence, which showed at MoCAB (Belgrade, Serbia), ARTIUM and Salzburger Kunstverein (Salzburg, Austria).

Her critical writings have been included in several international publications among which the catalogues for the Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial and the Greek Pavilion for the 2015 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space stand out. She has collaborated with periodicals such as (New York, USA) , Arte al Dia International (Miami, USA) and EXIT and Campo de Relámpagos (Spain), among many others. She has participated in several talks, workshops, curatorial residencies and seminars held in a variety of international locations.

During this past year she has curated big group shows like Hybris in MUSAC in León, LAZNIA, Gdansk, Poland, Cartografías Líquidas in Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, Sostener el infinito en la palma de la mano in Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid, among others.