Fundación Montemadrid’s Inéditos competition is one of the few initiatives in our country that helps young curators find their footing in the professional art world, giving the winners a chance to produce their first show and publish a bilingual Spanish/English exhibition catalogue.

We are especially proud of having supported the more than 50 young curators who have presented their curatorial projects at La Casa Encendida over the last fifteen years, and of having contributed to the promotion of their work by publishing the accompanying catalogues.

For Inéditos 2018, the jury comprising Ane Rodríguez, director of Tabakalera in San Sebastián, Andrea Bellini, director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, and Marco Roso, curator and member of the DIS artists’ collective, decided the winning projects described below:

Winning projects of Inéditos 2018

1. Project: Cuerpo presente. Censura y performatividad [Bodily Present: Censorship and Performativity]

   Curator: Lorena Saura Cuenca (Madrid, 1989)

   This exhibition tells a story that begins in Spain in the late 1960s. During the Franco dictatorship, official art history had been dominated by a Spanish art entrenched in the aesthetic production of past centuries and new figurative or incipient expressionist artists like Miquel Barceló, Carlos Alcolea or Antonio López, whose apolitical paintings reasserted their specificity, while government authorities superfluously sought international recognition with the aim of exporting their works to fairs and biennials.

   The show revisits the expressions based on body performativity developed in those years by artists like Olga I. Pijoan, Nazario, Gonçal Sobrer, Carlos Pazos, Pepe Espaliú, José Pérez Ocaña, Las Costus, Juan Hidalgo, Ángels Ribé, Fina Miralles and Esther Ferrer, which were forgotten after Franco's death and the Spanish transition to democracy. The aim of this exhibition is to shine a spotlight on those actions and representations so that they can be scientifically and critically re-examined, thereby revising the history of contemporary art in late Franco-era Spain.

   Artists: Olga L. Pijoan, Pepe Espaliú, Fina Miralles, Las Costus, Gonçal Sobrer, Juan Hidalgo, Esther Ferrer, Carlos Pazos, José Pérez Ocaña, Nazario, Ángels Ribé

2. Project: Regreso al futuro [Back to the Future]

   Curator: Rafael Barber Cortell (Valencia, 1985)

   On 4 February 1986, a few days late due to the commotion surrounding the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on live TV, Ronald Reagan gave the customary State of the Union address. Speaking directly to young people, Reagan referred to the call of the future as something too strong to be wasted on a life of apathy. To the audience's surprise, he then went on to quote the final line of that year's highest grossing film, Back to the Future:

   "Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads."

   Rather than focusing on works that have imagined other futures far from the immediate present, this exhibition project aims to explore the genealogies that have helped to construct a canonical, collective future. Regreso al futuro does not seek alternatives in utopia or science fiction, which according to Fredric Jameson are the scenarios that have delimited a history of the future. This project looks back to dismantle that explosive driving force we call the future, which energised a worldview now revealed as obsolete.

   Artists: Ibon Aranberri, Iván Argote, Hanna Black, Ludovica Carbotta, Eva Fábregas, Luis López Carrasco

3. Project: Can’t Speak for Itself

   Curators: Ali A. Maderuelo (Valencia, 1993) and Julia Castelló (Barcelona, 1992)

   Can’t Speak for Itself examines the need to expand the limits of the documentary beyond the realm of images, using sound, performance, handwriting, textiles and the written word as references. The show brings together a group of artists whose practice narrates, in heterodox ways, fundamental aspects of contemporary reality and the facts and events that shape it.

   This exhibition aims to ask new questions about the art forms associated with the idea of the documentary today, when we are gradually losing faith in this model of representation, and to explore the relationship between fact and fiction or the changing role of documentary forms in the contemporary age. The featured artists therefore work in different disciplines, bringing perspectives from the fields of audio, performance, the performing arts, song, textiles and digital archives.

   Artists: Mario Santamaría, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Tamara Kuselman, Mounira Al Solh and Niño de Elche (Francisco Conteras)