UNTIL MONDAY 12/10
VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
In the era of image overabundance, las fake news, iconographic excess and Artificial Intelligence, the Alicante photographer Cristina Middel comes to question, one more time, the supposed objectivity of photography. That can be true without being real. “This one is from Alicante and takes photos, let it come”, Middel says that they thought of the IVAM when they invited her to put on an exhibition, What they didn't expect was this cardboard-wrapped experimental failure that aspires to create chaos called Apoteosis Now. Images are grouped by color, but they avoid any other type of connection between them to dislodge the visitor as much as possible.. As in a final fireworks, where you can't hear the firecrackers separately, but inside an apotheotic magma, everything at once (everywhere). Middel can allow it because he no longer seeks narrativity, she is tired of the story. The important thing is no longer what is happening within the images, or how they talk to each other, What is important is the context in which they live..
Having said that, yes let's talk about what they contain the images, rescued from the discards of different projects carried out during the last twenty years. Among them, the series of The Afronauts of 2012 with which Middel criticized Western stereotypes about Africa, the one that earned him the most absolute international recognition. Then came the National Photography Award (2017), the presidency of the Magnum agency (2022-25) and the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts (2024). He has achieved everything by sliding from photojournalism and documentary photography towards a more artistic one., at times conceptual, with which he fables to address reality without a clear goal. “If I manage to take photos that are useless, “It is when I get closer to what I like about photography.”, he said at a press conference. And in this floating “nonsense”, What makes the most sense is for the viewer to look at the virginal images, to experiment without having read a text that explains what you are going to see. It is, in Apoteosis Now, will appear at the end of the tour, after raising your eyebrow in front of a flan with cream that appears recurrently, and of escrollear between images of horses and boat engines, piles of clothes, a tropical still life, heels that invent legs in a surrealism that is close to that of Chema Madoz, glasses of red watermelon, a mountain of pizza, a bar of soap that questions us about the weight of fame, a coffee overflowing with sugar and oranges on a blanket of snow. Any sense? ¿No? Well that's the idea. S.M.
