press release only in german

Inéditos 2017
From 16 June to 10 September

La Casa Encendida is pleased to present three exhibitions produced by the winners of the Inéditos 2017 competition. This year's featured curators are Bárbara Cueto, Maite López-Pastor and Beatriz Ortega Botas.

Inéditos is a competition held at La Casa Encendida since 2002 that helps young curators find their footing in the professional art world, giving the three winners a chance to produce their first show and publish an exhibition catalogue. Over the years, this competition has become one of the most important funding initiatives for creators of contemporary art exhibitions in Spain. In this edition, a jury consisting of Tanya Barson, Chief Curator at the MACBA in Barcelona, Beatriz Herráez, independent curator and art critic, and Pedro Gandahno, director of the MAAT in Lisbon, selected the following exhibitions:

I Would Prefer Not To. Curated by Bárbara Cueto (b. Oviedo, 1986).


Room A


This exhibition takes its title from Bartleby the Scrivener's famous refusal to perform any task requested of him, "I would prefer not to". Echoing that negation, the show explores the potential of "not-doing" as a political action. Because "not-doing" has no place in the general scheme of things, it poses a threat to the established order perpetuated by neoliberalism. "Not-doing" is a way of overcoming the paradoxical freedom of the current post-Fordist society, where the boss has become a slave to his/her own work in the endless quest for optimisation and productivity, and where success is measured in degrees of exhaustion.


Artists: Mercedes Azpilicueta / Liz Magic Laser / Ben Rivers / Pepo Salazar / Pilvi Takala

Scenographies of Power: The Calculated Materialisation of States of Exception. Curated by Maite López-Pastor (b. Madrid, 1988).


Room B


This exhibition offers a reflection on the spaces that materialise in a state of exception and are typical of today's globalised world. A state of exception is legally and politically articulated as a mechanism of the distribution of power. Insofar as this state of exception is a political construct, it can present varying degrees of consolidation. The itinerary proposed in Scenographies of Power reveals how, in the spatial materialisations of exception, the aesthetic becomes political. These spaces of exception are interrogated by several artists who work with what goes on in those spaces, using disruptive propositions to critically represent, record or reactive them.


Artists: Mediengruppe Bitnik / Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev / Taryn Simon / Trevor Paglen / Arkadi Zaides / Susan Schuppli

Grasping a Concept is Mastering the Use of a Form (Comprender el concepto del uso de la forma). Comisariada por Beatriz Ortega Botas (Oviedo, 1990).

Room C

Rather than avoiding the centrality of human experience, the exhibition Grasping a Concept is Mastering the Use of a Form investigates the pivotal role of aesthetic experience in facilitating the necessary convergence of thought and matter, thus ensuring that knowledge is rational but also realistic and materialistic. The importance of this aesthetic encounter stems from the fact that it forces reason to be flexible, constantly questioning and revising its firmest convictions; the rationalism defended here is a state of open-mindedness, where the creativity and constant novelty of forms offered by art are not only possible but necessary.

Artists: Sophie Bueno-Boutellier / Erik Niedling / Carlos Fernández-Pello / Francesca Ferreri / Esther Gatón / Carl Mannov / Zoë Paul / Bettina Samson / Alberto Vallejo