Artist
Cristina Galán
Cristina Galán (b.1992, Spain) is a visual artist working mainly with photography and video. Her work explores the subversion of identity and the appearance of the sinister beneath the visually polished surface of reality, reflecting on the search for individual identity through collective identity. Galán builds in each work a universe with its own symbols and codes where everything that is there is there to be seen. Galán's work has been exhibited in Festivals and art centres such as Festival F2, Dortmund, Germany / Photo Israel, tel Aviv, Israel / CEART (Art Center Tomás y Valiente), Madrid, Spain / ProyectArte 19, Sevilla, Spain / Athens Photo Festival, Athens, Greece / XVI Bienal internacional de fotografía de Córdoba, Spain / 2018 Muestra de Arte Joven, La Rioja, Spain. She was also selected in ViPhoto Fest, Vitoria, España / Encontros da imagen, Discovery Awards and Emergentes, Braga, Portugal / Fotonoche, Art Center Alcobendas (CAA), Madrid, España. In 2018 PAUL received the Silver Prize in Fine- Art-Portrait category in TIFA. Tokio, Japón.
Paul was also published in Pewen photography notebooks (publishing house Muga) #38 and in Revista VA! #4.
Paul
Visual stimuli saturation in our society affects our sense of identity. Technology and social media have created a system that paradoxically didn’t help to individualize the singular characteristics of each person, but their homogenization instead. we have created a reality where happiness is not a possibility, it is an imperative. These photographs explore, from the traditional portrait background, the identity subversion and the rise of a sinister nature beneath the visually polished appearance of reality.
Neutral and impersonal settings, sometimes not defined and abstract, inside which individuality loses itself and camouflages with these settings. Places that have in common being the typical places of a consumer society. That’s why these enclosed spaces lack horizons, they are plain and closed, independently of being exterior or interior; they are empty, neutral and homogeneous, spaces without identity.
These scenes have fake naturalness, theatrical distort, because everything that appears in the image is there to be seen. Characters appear suspended in time, making their immobile and mechanic characteristics more obvious, oblivious to what is happening around them. Spaces where light shines 24 hours a day, representing the 24/7 modern society standard, always ready, always productive.
Color is a fundamental element on this work, like the setting, it helps with the homogenization and neutrality idea, in other words: alienation. On top of that they also have a large symbolic meaning. The contrast between pink color (Femininity, infancy and youth symbol) and black (The psychological antonym, represented in delirious and disturbing eyes of the photographed), seems to corrupt the naif atmosphere allowing an uncomfortable and disturbing feeling to be born in the viewer.
Ignacio Navas draws from everyday life to explore the political, social and personal structures that comprise us. His project is a critique on the capitalist system, and the
instances of micro-violence that define it.
With her Paul project, Cristina Galán suggests the subversion of identity and something sinister under the visually-polished surfaces of reality. Figures suspended in
time appear in an idealised but impersonal world, representing the clichéd spaces of consumer society.
A disturbing feeling also permeates Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Dialect project, which saw the artist recreate the everyday lives of a group of Moroccan youngsters, as they await a future beyond an immigrant centre in Seville.
In Como la casa mía Laura C. Vela accompanies Xirou, a Chinese immigrant woman, in her search for a way of being in the world. The work is both an exploration of the main character’s inner world and a significant photographic encounter between two women.
Finally, Lorena Morin reflects on family life through intimate images of her partner, herself and their children. Captured in shared domestic spaces, her photographic diary reflects 15 years of familial love and unbreakable bonds.