The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin

The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin
Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin

February 20–May 23, 2021

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.