Es Baluard Museu supports the work of balearic women curators and theoreticians for the development of its exhibition programme
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents the future curators and researchers who will work on the upcoming projects that the Museum will programme with Balearic artists or those linked to their context, based on specific projects that will be developed in Exhibition Hall D from 2025 onwards. These exhibition cycles will be planned in relation to the themes proposed in each of the parts of the Nachleben trilogy, which articulates the general programme, and will have their corresponding editorial project.
Es Baluard Museu’s director, David Barro, points out that ‘the presence of a generation of very active young women curators in the Balearic archipelago is very significant, and the Museum must function as a platform to promote and support these independent curators who enrich the context and incorporate new ways of working’. The director remarked that the Museum must serve for the national and international projection of talent and that, while the presence of female artists at Es Baluard has been frequent, the invitation to female curators from outside the Museum has been less so. ‘In this new stage, we want to make a firm commitment to this generation of female curators and theoreticians who are working with great intellectual demand’, he stated.
The guest curators for this first cycle of exhibitions are Raquel Victoria (Palma de Mallorca, 1998), Esmeralda Gómez Galera (Ciudad Real, 1993), Aina Pomar (Palma de Mallorca, 1986), Cristina Anglada (Madrid, 1984) and Sofía Moisés (Palma, 1987), all of them active protagonists of the Balearic artistic context in recent years. David Barro introduced each of the curators with some biographical notes and then gave them the word and, without revealing who will be the protagonists of their exhibitions – since the full programme for 2025 will be presented in the upcoming months – commented on their artistic interests and the importance of Es Baluard Museu’s commitment to a generation of curatorial professionals who represent the present and the future of contemporary art.
Raquel Victoria, the curator who will start the cycle next January 2025, explained that in her curatorial practice she focuses on three key areas: the unification of different narratives to generate new stories, the analysis of the exhibition space and its influence on the perception of art, and the intersection between sound and contemporary art. These lines of research allow her to question and re-imagine existing narratives, explore how the white cube and other exhibition spaces condition the construction of meanings, and experiment with the fusion of artistic languages to create curatorial experiences that invite dialogue and reflection.
Esmeralda Gómez Galera, for her part, states that her curatorial practice interrogates traces, journeys and displacements, both physical and symbolic, exploring the stories that emerge from movement and the presence of the body in space. She investigates how contemporary artists respond critically to specific geographical, social and ecological contexts, highlighting collaborative practices. She has also commented that she is interested in how the materials used in the works act not only as expressive media, but also as carriers of memory and agents of change, capable of telling stories and establishing deep connections with the environment.
Aina Pomar‘s curatorial practice focuses on the relationship between territory, identity and patterns of thought. Recently, she has approached island studies, exploring the notion of island, archipelago and sea from a relational perspective. She is also interested in collective thinking, in the interactions that take place between artists, their works, the exhibition space and the curator during the process of preparing exhibitions. And how these interactions trigger conversations that, together, generate collective knowledge. Both aspects will be reflected in the project she will develop at Es Baluard Museu.
Cristina Anglada has explained that she moved with her family from Madrid to a village in the Tramuntana five years ago, just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic. Since then, she has been incorporating slower, more attentive and porous ways of accompanying artists, nourished mainly by pure curiosity, conversation and exchange.
Lately, she has been researching more deeply into those devices that work on the construction of the narrative; how, through the elaboration of stories, we can outline ways of rehearsing, rescuing or simply imagining other worlds and ways of building community, while at the same time facing the complexity of a present in crisis.
Sofia Moisés‘ curatorial line is characterised by an interdisciplinary approach that fuses historical research with the exploration of contemporary narratives, placing special emphasis on cultural resignification and the connection between art and society. For her it is important to integrate a critical analysis of history, promoting dialogues between the past and the present through works by contemporary artists and exploring how events and figures from the past can be reinterpreted in the present context.
In addition, her curatorial practice stands out for its willingness to create spaces for dialogue and reflection and for its concern for the socio-cultural context in which they are developed, seeking to connect art with local and global realities and ensuring that the exhibitions not only respond to artistic concerns, but also reflect the social, political and cultural dynamics of the environment in which they are presented.
In the announcement, the director of Es Baluard Museu, clarified that any curator who is now linked to a particular exhibition cycle can also collaborate at other times in another exhibition cycle or curate another exhibition of the general programme, in order to generate complicities between the Museum and its closest context. Also that ‘this commitment will not be limited to these curators who share the same generational condition, but we will extend it to other spaces and projects of the Museum, to some pioneers who have been doing relevant work in the field of Balearic arts for many years, and to Es Baluard Museu’s own artistic team, led by Soad Houman and Jackie Herbst, of great professional competence. Of course, we will invite curators from other contexts, but the commitment to these curators will dominate our programme. They are the future, but also the present that is making the Balearic artistic context so attractive and fresh’.