Activities, exhibitions and projects

From March 22, 2024, to September 1, 2024

"Coser el río" (Sewing the River) is a visual and emotional narrative crafted through the work of Victoria Gil (Badajoz, 1964), one of the first Spanish artists whose practice has been aligned with feminist currents since the late 1980s.

Artworks created specifically for this exhibition are displayed alongside earlier pieces that contextualize her work, contributing to the creation of a space that avoids forms of control and encourages the free flow of thoughts and desires in a narrative generated by Esther Regueira, curator and connoisseur of Gil's work since the nineties, a feminist interested in works that incorporate gender perspectives.

This exhibition showcases paintings, drawings, documentation of performances, and textile practices where the artist proposes a clear dehierarchization of genders, formats, and techniques established throughout history. The proposals revolve around abuses of power, the political construction of bodies, taboos imposed by religion, the objectification of women in patriarchal society, the consequences of decolonial processes, and the effects of capitalism on our identities, desires, bodies, and subjectivities. Additionally, themes of love and relationships derived from always subjective interpretations of this sentiment are explored. These are works where we can appreciate fundamental tools of Gil's practice: transgression and a particular sense of humor.

Victoria Gil's work questions the banality of the binary categorization established by the official heteropatriarchal history that divides women into good and bad. This artist is a Houdini who escapes the socially imposed constraints on women and liberates many others. She pays homage not only to well-known women who have made history with their own names but also to anonymous citizens whose lives and work are as fundamental as others. This includes field workers ("Estábamos tan tranquilitas"), caregivers ("La buena vecina"), or colonized individuals ("Los locales trabajan"). In these pieces, she retrieves the domestic memory of women overlooked by official narratives. To achieve this, she turns to textile arts as an artistic language, understanding that sewing, embroidery, and weaving are not merely pastimes relegated to the domestic sphere but feminist political actions with the potential to trigger social debates.