Friday, June 6, 2014

Xavier Ribas at The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona

 
Xavier Ribas - A History of Detonations, 2013

BARCELONA.- The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona presents the first solo exhibition by Xavier Ribas (Barcelona, 1960) that brings together a substantial body of work made by the photographer over the last decade. The exhibition takes its title from his latest investigative project into the extraction of sodium nitrate. The system of colonial exploitation led by British companies in the Chilean Atacama Desert is a case study whose geographical and historical scope is held to question by Ribas’s photographic practice. This ambitious study, produced between 2009 and 2014, is presented here for the first time along with a selection of his earlier works. The first part of the exhibition – which prefaces the section dedicated specifically to Nitrate – includes four photographs from the Sanctuary series (2002) and eight series from the most extensive group of works in the artist’s career, Concrete Geographies (2002–9). In the mid-1990s Xavier Ribas first became known with his project Sundays , 1994–97, an investigation of the outskirts of Barcelona. With this series, which initiated his anthropological perspective and earned him immediate recognition, he began his research on the relationship between the urban and the everyday. The projects collected under the title Sanctuary (1998–2002) continue the exploration of urban peripheries with works in which the author addresses the interstitial spaces of the city.

You can read the full text to this piece on artdaily HERE and more on the Ribas website HERE.

Xavier Ribas - Desert Trails, 2012 (detail)


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