Inéditos 2017

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: from the State of Exception to the Spaces of Exception. Curated by Maite Borjabad López-Pastor (Madrid, 1988).



Room B


This exhibition proposes a reflection on the spaces that materialise the “state of exception” and that are representative of power structures of today’s globalised world. In doing so, this exhibition aspires to claim the spatial articulations that make possible to institute and enforce the state of exception as a tool of power wielded by the contemporary political apparatus. The itinerary proposed in Scenographies of Power reveals how, in the spatial materialisa- tions of the exception, the aesthetic becomes political. These spaces of exception are interrogated by the different artists, who work with that which takes places in them, using disruptive propositions to critically represent, record or reactivate them to allow alternative readings of the political framework that hosts each of them.


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

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