Nuria Güell: All Order Is Required Pure / The Sensuous Transformation

From June 19 to October 10, 2021, Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona will host All Order Is Required Pure by Núria Güell and The Sensible Transformation, a group show curated by Oriol Fontdevila.

All Order Is Required Pure by Núria Güell
A retrospective exhibition in three acts and an epilogue

In terms of power, what unsettles Núria Güell most isn’t the power that is legitimised solely through force or violence, but the power that is legitimised through truth, acclamation, through moral good. Power that is represented as (a) good is much harder to avoid, because goods are not only a response to a need but also, and above all, represent a source of satisfaction and enjoyment. Collectively, as subjects, we enjoy conforming to a power or being reciprocated by it and this power is held by anything on which we project, consciously or unconsciously, the value of (the) Good. Those fetishised things, on which value or power is projected are those that govern communities. And who can refuse to obey a mandate for the “common good”?

Greatly simplifying, for All Order Is Required Pure, the artist uses previous projects as a channel for delving into the moralistic and totalising decline of current public opinion, clearly visible in the redeeming intention of cultural institutions, and at the same time for questioning her, the artist’s, own involvement in this decline. Through this process, Núria answers the institutional request for a retrospective exhibition with five new proposals and the complicity of six artists, two ex-prisoners, some priests and a YouTuber nun.

The Sensuous Transformation
Artists: Assemble Studio, Patricia Esquivias, Javier Peñafiel & Rita Rakosnik, Julia Ramírez-Blanco & Paula García-Masedo
Curated by Oriol Fontdevila

What is the political value of beauty in the present day?

The Sensuous Transformation presents various proposals for the cohabitation of beauty: against the idea of individual taste or the aestheticization of social and thought systems, in this project beauty is understood as an organising principle and an energising force of knowledge.

Sensual pleasure leads to contact between bodies. This is the path of access, where we relate to each other with alterity, even though this makes us irremediably dependent and therefore vulnerable. Beauty is a provision that ensures life together between different species, while at the same time constituting an attack on any presumption of independence: once desire for another has been aroused, no form of autonomy is worth a thing.

The set of proposals produced for Sensuous Transformation understand beauty in consonance with the challenges of a shared world. Assemble Studio addresses the sensual qualities of environments as the basic principle for the development of ways of life; Patricia Esquivias studies the colonial implications of craft making, while evoking alternative relational possibilities; Javier Peñafiel & Rita Rakosnik set up a mail correspondence with human and non-human agents involved in various struggles that are simultaneously recognised as producers of beauty and political resistance; Júlia Ramírez-Blanco & Paula García-Masedo explore modes of self-organisation from the representations that these very communities, living as they do on the edge, have created for themselves.