Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin: The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin / Martí Anson: A Straight Exhibition

From February 20 to May 23, 2021, Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona will host A Straight Exhibition, by Martí Anson, and The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin, a posthumous show where Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin announce to the world that they have decided to “die.” Both exhibitions will change over time, questioning the limits of the creative act, authorship and the institution itself.

The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin
In December 2020, two days before the United Kingdom closed its borders, a 13-metre-long articulated truck left London for Barcelona. The truck was packed with wooden crates loaded with every piece of work produced by the artists Broomberg & Chanarin, as well as their unprinted negatives, contact prints, intimate notes and sketches of unrealised projects.

After 23 years of collaboration, the duo has legally, economically, creatively and conceptually committed suicide. Their last will and testament will be opened and read aloud on February 20 at Fabra i Coats, alongside a display of their estate, which will be exhibited gradually over the 3-month exhibition in the presence of an archivist, who will publicly appraise the estate inside the gallery halls.

This is the first posthumous retrospective of their much celebrated career, the end of an important collaboration, but without nostalgia. With their “death,” they question authorship, memory and heritage as closed concepts. That is why this exhibition traces and continues the “exquisite corpse” of their trajectory.

Adam Broomberg (Johannesburg, 1970) and Oliver Chanarin (London, 1971) have worked in a forensic and paranoid interrogation of the photographic medium, in search of everything cultural, emotional, political and economic that governs the currency of images. They have received numerous awards, including the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (UK), the Infinity Award for Publication (USA) and the Arles Photo-text Book Award (France). They are professors of photography at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and their work is included in private and public collections, including MoMA, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou.

A Straight Exhibition
Martí Anson proposes an exhibition under construction, without rules or explanations. The only starting point is to break with chronological and spatial linearity in order to introduce the creative process inside the room—the more anonymous the better. Anson places the visitor inside the artistic practice, which takes place in constant and unpredictable transformation during the exhibition. Hence the title, A Straight Exhibition, as it takes shape and meaning as time goes by, like life itself.

This exhibition cannot be seen from a distance, it can only be experienced in time and from within. To enter means to leave aside contemplation and decide whether we want to participate in this game that runs from parody to heresy, from critical reflection to action. As W. Eugène Smith once said: “I didn’t write the rules, why should I follow them?”

Can we think of an exhibition as a collective practice? What happens if the message is not fixed in advance? Is it possible for it to be made and unmade? The question is not what innovative idea or presentation we make of the artist’s works, but how we can activate them, make them available, and so motivate a common use of the exhibition space.

Martí Anson (Mataró, 1967) is accustomed to playing with the participation of other artists and the surprise of the public. He approaches his works and exhibitions as constructions, architectures capable of receiving other languages and facing unexpected results. Most recent projects include The Catalan Pavilion, Anonymous Architect (Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Fundació Suñol, Barcelona; Beaufort Biennial, Belgium), and La Botiga de l’Anson (MACBA, Barcelona; Be-Part Waregem, Belgium).