Where will we go from here?

Participating artists: María Alcaide, Noa and Lara Castro, Fito Conesa, Regina de Miguel, El Palomar, Antoni Hervàs, Momu & No Es, Andrea Muniáin, Paloma Polo, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Putochinomaricón, Petrit Halilaj and Álvaro Urbano

Curated by Rosa Ferré and Ana Ara.

The Frankfurter Kunstverein will open its doors to the Guest of Honour Spain from October 14, 2022 to January 29, 2023 as part of the cultural programme for the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022.

Curated by Rosa Ferré and Ana Ara, the exhibition Where will we go from here? encompasses twelve works, twelve visual stories coming from Spain in an exhibition conceived around a question that arises from a globalized context of shared uncertainty, and that rehearses a multiple answer from a specific geopolitical and cultural framework.

In this third decade of the 21st century, fundamental changes are taking place, and at such a pace, that we can barely process them. We realise that to chart the present day means we are compelled to engage with the environmental and resource-related crisis, which plays a key role, set against the backdrop of all the other crises, including the war, and which crucially shapes the actions of the world’s societies. Politics is proving incapable of dealing with a reality that is too complex and interconnected, which is dominated by automated financial mechanisms. After a global pandemic, in the midst of a Europe of dwindling significance, we are at that moment of assimilating that the world in which we lived no longer exists. Whatever happened to the technological utopia and potential for emancipation of the Internet? We are still far from imagining the future, trying to find tools that anchor us in a new epistemology that we will have to inhabit. For the present crisis is not just one of the environment, it is also one of world views, of relationships, a crisis of language, of awareness, a crisis of narrative.

This exhibition aims to explore the role played by “fiction” in the artistic practice of the recent Spanish context for the construction of imaginaries that help us to recover our present. It aims to offer a journey through the work of certain artists in which the fable, the narrative structures inherited from stories and myths, have a deep imprint in their procedures and in their visual language, proposing stories that question the cultural and social constructions with which we operate, that is to say, our ideology.

Where will we go from here? is a collection of stories that address the tales that we have been told and that have led us to this uncertain present, that propose alternative narratives on the concept of identity—of our own, of the collective—, twisting the inherited ideas of progress, recovering pre-modern fables, investigating in procedures of the absurd and humor, from autofiction or taking possession of the estrangement of science fiction. Gender identity as fiction? History as fiction? Human identity itself as fiction?

Several stories are told through the moving image, while others are installations or architecture, which work with the space themselves as a form of speculation on other worlds. Installations that see the room and those in it as potential protagonists in a story. 

Where will we go from here? is supported by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) as part of Spain’s Guest of Honour appearance at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2022.