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15/1/2009

Anna Malagrida

Galeria Senda, Barcelona

SENDA Gallery presents the recent photographic work by Spanish artist Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970), realized in 2007 in Jordan, in which she proposes a new reflection on the ways of seeing and on the photographic language itself.

Vistas veladas (Veiled views) consists of a series of photographs of Amman, the Jordanian capital city, taken from the rooms of the luxury-hotels which overlook the city. The artist chooses a privileged point of view which can be seen as a symbol of power and adverts to the clash of cultures and the economic difference. Thus, she adopts a perspective which symbolizes the dominant though misguided viewpoint from Western to Eastern world; a pretended omnipotence which only occults the incapacity to “see” the other and reminds us that hypocrisy is one of the main ills of our society.

Taking the photographs, a little accident occurred. The hotels are in the spotlight, too, while safety precautions in the hotels have been maximized. The x-rays of the security devices located in the entries of the hotels partly destroyed the negatives due to overexposure. Photographic precision disappeared and transparency spread all over. Consequently, the urban landscape appears bathed with a shading light, which blurs the definite profile of the city. The accidentally veiling of the photographs inspired the artist in her working progress and became the principal theme of this photographic series: the veiling as a barrier or veil, as an obstacle of the view and a metaphor of the blinded sight.

As a counterpoint to the views from above, in the video installation entitled Danza de mujer (Dance of woman) Malagrida re-creates the interior of a small refuge in the Jordanian desert. A subtle intervention –the black curtains overhanging windows and doors– confers a poetic and metaphoric dimension to the surrounding. The semi-transparent curtain acts as a veil and alludes to the idea of confinement and to the feminine, but at the same time it can be seen as a representation of the camera shutter, which mediates between light and darkness.

In this work Malagrida resumes the confrontation between inner and outer space, light and dark, transparency and opacity, reality and representation. Vistas veladas is a reflection on the limits of photography as well as on the contemporary world and our relation to it. It interrogates the limits of the visible and it inscribes itself in the act of seeing as an aesthetic and political experience.

Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) graduated in Communication Studies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and is Bachelor at the L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, France. Her oeuvre has been shown in institutions such as the Kulturhuset of Stockholm (2008), the Fotomuseum Den Haag, The Hague (2008), the Instituto Cervantes of Paris (2006) and the Centro Cultural Conde Duque in Madrid (2004), among others. Her work is part of important public and private collections of international renown, as the ARTIUM (Vitoria), Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (Paris), MUSAC (Leon, Spain), Council of the Museum of Modern Art (New York) or Fundación La Caixa (Barcelona). Current exhibitions: Nuevas historias, A New Vision of Spanish Photography and Video Art, Kulturhuset Stockholm, and Frecuencias, a group show commissioned by Juan Carlos Rego and presented in the venues of the Instituto Cervantes in Morocco. Anna Malagrida lives and works in Paris.

Galeria Senda
Consell de Cent, 337 - Barcelona

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