UVNT Mahou TALKS

Modera: Sara Rubayo

Sara Rubayo, also known as La Gata Verde on Youtube, has a degree in Art History and a master's degree in exhibition coordination. Tired of the gray academic discourses and the soporific tone with which this subject is usually transmitted, she decided to share with the rest of the world her way of understanding the history of art. In 2015 she opened her YouTube channel where she brings art history closer to people of all ages in a fun but rigorous way and already has more than 100,000 subscribers.

He researches, writes, communicates, records, edits and disseminates quality content ranging from the great classics of painting to the latest trends in art. Her informative work is also focused on Instagram and Twitter where she shares posts, stories and threads about art from original points of view.

She pays special attention to the rescue of women that art history had relegated to the background. The result is "pintorAs", the result of the search and chronological ordering of women artists under a single premise: "all in and none out" however short their biography was. 

To finance her activity, she and her team have created a complete course on Art History, she organizes guided visits to the Prado Museum and occasionally collaborates with institutions by giving talks and lectures.

Cem A. aka @freeze_magazine

Cem A. is an artist and curator with a background in anthropology. He is known for running the art meme page @freeze_magazine. Since its inception in 2019, @freeze_magazine has become a tool for creative collaborations between Cem and fellow artists, researchers and organisations. His work explores topics such as survival and alienation in the art world, often through a hyper-reflexive lens.

Selected exhibitions include documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022) and solo exhibitions Hope You See Me as a Friend at Barbican Centre, London (2022); Pleased to Announce... at Versus Art Project, Istanbul (2022) and The Party at Weserhalle, Berlin (2021). He has held lectures at HeK Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel; Universität der Künste, Berlin; Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins, London. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Art Newspaper and Dazed Magazine.

Javier Sainz de los Terreros

"With a degree in Humanities and in Advertising and Public Relations from the University of Navarra, and a Master in Cultural Management and Policy from the City University of London, he has been in charge of digital communication at the Prado Museum for more than ten years.

From 2017 he developed a strategy of daily live videos through Instagram, achieving great success in terms of audience and getting The New York Times to recommend it as one of the 5 art accounts to follow. He also organizes digital events and runs social media campaigns, for which the Museo del Prado has been awarded on several occasions, such as the Webby Awards of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, an award that celebrates excellence on the Internet.

In 2020 it launched the Institution's account on TikTok, achieving millions of views and leading the presence of major international museums on the network. As a result of this work, the Prado's account recently received the ForYouFest award from TikTok, in the category of educational content. In October 2022, the international magazine Blooloop will include it among the 50 Museum Influencers who are promoting the development of museums through innovation and creativity.

Ornella Pocetti

Ornella Pocetti was born in Buenos Aires in 1991. She studied Visual Arts at the National University of Art in Buenos Aires, training in parallel in various workshops and programs. In 2015 She presented her first solo show at the Acéfala gallery in Buenos Aires and in 2019 received a scholarship from the renowned Artists x Artists Program. She is also part of the artistic group “Viento Dorado” and does children’s editorial illustration. His works have been selected in the National Hall contest (2021), Felix Amador Hall (2018 and 2019) in the National Endowment for the Arts (2018), Itaú Prize (2019), Rosario Castagnino - Macro National Hall (2018) and in the X Banco Central National Painting Prize (2017), receiving a mention in the last four.

Gema Polanco

Gema Polanco (Valencia 1992) is a visual artist. Her work, oriented to installation, also integrates textiles, drawing, music and photography. She questions the feminine heritage that imprisons women and categorizes them, always looking for new places, alter egos, that allow us to be who we want to be. Appropriating and allying herself with punk aesthetics, the rebellious and spontaneous so that new forms of care, honest, accessible and peaceful are possible.

Graduated in Photography at the London College of Communication (London,2015), postgraduate in master PHotoEspaña (Madrid, 2016) and Master in Visual Arts and Education at the UB (Barcelona, 2017). His work has been exhibited in festivals such as Circulation(s) in Paris, PhotoEspaña, PhotoAlicante, Art Nou, Loop Barcelona, Miami New Media Festival in Miami and Aragon Park.

He recently took part in the exhibition Punk Beginnings 2022 at the Galería Jorge López (Valencia), curated the exhibition "Sonido Madrid: Trance en las salas", received the Circuitos 2022 award from the Sala de Arte Joven, received extraordinary support from Matadero crea and participated in the exhibition El Arca at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid) curated by Pia Ogea, Ahora mismo: todo está por hacer y todo es posible curated by Chus Martinez and Rosa Lleó at Arts Santa Mónica (Barcelona) In parallel Gema Polanco works as an art director, film director, curator and stylist mainly in the music industry. She is also the founder of Navaja Automatica transforming visual culture generated by music into fashion, prints and zines under the D.I.Y legacy since 2017.

Eloy Arribas

Eloy Arribas (Valladolid, 1991) graduated in Fine Arts in Salamanca in 2014. His first solo exhibition takes place at Da2 in Salamanca, in 2016. His works have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in galleries in New York, Madrid, Barcelona or Copenhaghe and are part of collections such as the Rucandio Collection. His work does not try to verbalize, but to illustrate. To illustrate that series of ideas that are difficult to express and that, because of their emotional nature, can only be fully embraced in a sensitive way: success, hate, rage, envy, jealousy, love, failure, sexuality, death, passion, joy; the party, the fight, music concerts, relationships, destructive behavior. He intends to allude to its content, to forget the name, to plastically reconstruct its body and to suggest possible nominal formulations that manifest themselves in the mind of the spectator in a hidden and subliminal way. He tries to build tangible realities, scenographies, through the destruction of the linguistic concepts that serve as referents.

Maite Borjabad

Maite Borjabad López-Pastor is a curator, architect and researcher whose work revolves around various forms of critical spatial practices that span architecture, art and performance. Having worked as a curator at major cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she describes her curatorial practice as an "institutional infiltration" that takes place at the intersection of these disciplines, as well as museum studies and institutional critique. Among Borjabad's most recent projects are Sections/Intersection: 25 Years of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection (2022), a major reinstallation of the collection, and Cecilia Bengolea's site-specific performance Dance of the Mutating Materialities (2022). She was previously Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she curated the contemporary collection and led key research and acquisitions initiatives to redefine collecting strategies since joining in 2017. In her five years in the position he also curated several significant installations and exhibitions, including Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rhame: If only this mountain between us could be ground to dust (2021), PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (2019), My Building, Your Design: Seven Portraits by David Hartt (2018), Designs for Different Futures (2019-2021, co-curated with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center), Past Forward: Architecture and Design Collection (2017-ongoing). Other projects as an independent curator include the exhibition and book Scenographies of Power: From State of Exception to Spaces of Exception (2017) at La Casa Encendida, Madrid, and Wet Protocols (2018) at MAO, Ljubljana. 

She has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois Chicago, and Columbia University and has shared her research at important forums such as Columbia University's Fitch Colloquium (2017) - Ex-Situ: On Moving Monuments where she presented "Architectural Collecting and Moving Buildings." Maite's writings have appeared in renowned magazines such as Harvard Design Magazine as her article, "Rerighting" History:The Benito Juarez Community Academy and her work has been celebrated in important media such as New York Times, Chicago Tribune, PIN-UP, Domus, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Terremoto Magazine, La Tempestad or El Cultural.

El Barroquista

Miguel Ángel Cajigal Vera is an art historian, professor and cultural disseminator. 

He collaborates in the historical divulgation program El condensador de Fluzo of La 2 of Televisión Española, in the program Julia en la Onda of Onda Cero and in the program Galicia por diante of Radio Galega. He is an author for Penguin Random House, where he published in 2021 his first book, Otra Historia del Arte, which has reached six editions. In 2022 he received the EDE Award as Best Digital Educator of Spain in the category of History.

He is a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and carries out his main professional activity as a museum educator.

Ela Fidalgo

Ela Fidalgo has developed her technique using embroidery, acrylic, fabrics, oil and waxes. Her work includes painting, sculpture and installation. In her paintings, Fidalgo gives form to emotions that manifest from her universe full of questions about human behavior beyond the domains of everyday life and thought. All of the artist’s production is strongly linked to her stage in fashion, which she applies to her work by embroidering Fidalgo was born in 1993 in Palma de Mallorca. She got a scholarship to study fashion design at IED Fashion Lab Madrid, where she won awards such as the Balenciaga award, The Amsterdam Global Conference on Sustainability and Transparency. During his third year she won the Fashion Talent award at the Mercedes Benz Fashion Week Madrid and in 2018, she was a finalist at the Festival d’Hyeres. Since 2016 she has focused on her artistic career, since then he has held three individual exhibitions.

Manuel M. Romero

Manuel M. Romero (Seville, Spain, 1993), graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Seville, the city where he lives and works. His painting is formed as a container of time in which everything that has happened in that particular space (which is the work) during a given period of time is described in detail, through a long process in which the supports and materials undergo accidents and mutations.

He has participated in group exhibitions such as: "Entre las formas que van hacia la sierpe y las formas que buscan el cristal" at CAAC or "Tocar la tierra" at C3A; as well as individual exhibitions: "En el cero de la forma" at Sala Santa inescrupulosos under the Iniciarte program or "Negro Hueso" at Artnueve gallery.

Alejandra Castro Rioseco

Alejandra serves as first South American woman on the Board of the worldwide International Chopin Society Federation headquartered in Warsaw, Poland. Her love for the arts guided her to integrate the Board of the Museo del Barrio in NYC from 2015-2019, the Latin America art acquisition Committee for the NYC based Guggenheim Museum and since 2020 she integrates the Middle East Guggenheim art acquisition committee. She is founder of the project”Exiled for the Arts, NYC”. She serves on the Board of the prestigious International Jose Limon ballet, with a mission towards education of children and youngsters through dance in the world.

Previously she founded the Mujer Opina Foundation in Chile to promote and educate on women development and empowerment, emphasizing the importance of first nation and indigenous traditions and language through the project Las Ultimas Mujeres, or “Last of the Women” to safeguard aspects of the millenary Mapuche culture in Chile.

Alejandra was an active participant in the establishment of the Gender Equality Roundtable in the Chilean Senate, collaborating with Human Rights organizations and supporting the Abortion Law to be allowed for in specific predefined causes. Her commitment to build towards a better and more harmonious and balanced society is expressed through her active engagement with organizations protecting the environment, promoting gender equality, promote music as part of basic children education.

Yann Leto

Yann Leto (1979, Bordeaux) is a French artist based in Spain since 2007. His painting is dense and detailed, has a clear approach to socio-political criticism and works as a collage where various typographic elements coexist with classical and modern elements. The encounters between the elements of the work are so clear that the gaps and the "unpainted" planes of the painting disappear. The approach without rules of the protagonists makes possible an emotional visual circle that repositions the human being in a society marked by malaise. Almost like an unhealthy collector, Leto stores a large amount of Google images and press clippings on several hard drives, a visual archive from which he draws to create his own universe.

Dorian Batycka

Dorian Batycka is a technology and culture journalist based in Warsaw. He is currently a contributor to CryptoSlate, but has previously contributed to Artnet News, Artforum, the Art Newspaper and CoinDesk.

ROSH

Artist born in 1977. Initially an explorer of urban spaces, ROSH sharpens his eye through the practice of graffiti in the places in transition of his hometown Elche. The line becomes his obsession. The pandemic forces him to rethink his relationship to space and creation. ROSH will then draw from his archives of images of the cities he has crossed, shapes, colors, to create a new language, random, in rupture with the pre-established compositions. The improvisation becomes total. Fascinated by Free Jazz, he will invent, using the computer tool, a program allowing him a new expression, free and deconstructed. The artist rushes into this open breach to explore another imaginary. A composer and an autonomous interpreter at the same time, ROSH gives to see in his works another rhythm of the cities, another vibration of the lines.

Jackie Herbst

Art Historian, Coordinator and curator of the artistic program of the CCA Andratx (Mallorca), as well as of the International Artist-in-Residence Program of the CCA, since 2015. She has recently curated the exhibitions "Endemic Creatures" by Stefan Rinck (2022), "Elementum" (2021) or "Stitch in the Aether" (2019) and has co-coordinated, among others, the exhibition project "The Last Cowboy is Dead" by Aguirre Schwarz (aka ZEVS) (2021). He has also collaborated as a juror in the "Untitled Art x CCA" (2022) and "Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby's Awards and Grants" (2002) and is a member of the MedGardens Environmental Art Projects Committee.

Santiago Talavera

Artist, born in 1978. The central axis of Santiago Talavera's work is the reflection on the human condition through the investigation of the landscape and its symbolic, narrative and spatial possibilities. He began to explore natural catastrophe as a metaphor through the installation and series Llegar a ser Oceáno in 2006, which showed abandoned houses and tsunamis. Color plays an important role and pink, from cerise to bubblegum pastel, has become a hallmark of his work. The absence of the human being in his works, coupled with an intimate and absurd atmosphere in which past and future seem to intermingle, accentuate the need to reflect on the place we occupy, rather than as mere observers.

Ignacio Lobera

Artist born in 1989. Ignacio Lobera elaborates his creation first through and around drawing, the line is at the center of a research where graphic elements are condensed to reinforce the expressiveness of the feature. Throughout his research, materials and supports are mixed in a composition where the human figure occupies a central place. The artist himself becomes the object of study in an alternating perspective, where questions and doubts are incorporated into spectral silhouettes. From paper to sculpture, the bodies unfold in a constant movement and occupy a singular space where interior and exterior merge. In search of the unfathomable intimate, Ignacio Lobera follows a random gesture and travels through a sensitive reality where body and space emerge.

Izam Zawhara

Izam Zawhara is a Contemporary Art Gallery Director, Art dealer, Curator, Art Consultant and Artists Representant. He is also an external resource for the University of Cincinnati and the School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico. Although he is not currently part of, he was a founder of the MECA fair. 

His skills expand to Exhibition Design and Art Handling and by helping artists develop ascending careers. As an Art Dealer he has worked with established art collectors, young art collectors, art lovers, institutions and corporations to match their interest with the adequate works of art.

Avelino Sala

La obra de Avelino Sala (1972) le ha llevado a cuestionar la realidad cultural y social con una mirada crítica y poco cómoda en un continuo explorar el imaginario social y político. Sus proyectos explotan la capacidad del arte para generar espacios de experimentación que den lugar a nuevas realidades. Sala es uno de los referentes españoles del arte como resistencia política. En su producción está presente una suerte de poética que contiene una reflexión sobre los poderes estatales y el control que estos ejercen. Su estética contundente añade fuerza a un discurso tan necesario como poderoso. 

Desde la década de los 2000 Sala trabaja en el contexto global del arte contemporáneo, exponiendo y participando en Bienales e instituciones como la Bienal del Fuego de Caracas (2006), VideoZone V Bienal de Vídeo Arte de Tel Aviv (2010), Nightcomers, 10 Bienal de Estambul (2007), Bienal del Fin del Mundo (2011), Bienal de Istmo Centro Americano de Guatemala (2014) o la Bienal Sur, Juntos aparte (2019). Su trabajo se presenta en 2020 en un gran proyecto en el Centre del Carmen de Valencia donde se desarrollan los temas en los que lleva años trabajando: las migraciones, la dislocación contemporánea, la crisis medioambiental y las paradojas del capitalismo.

Feels Good Man

One day Matt Furie draws a frog with his pants down, uploads it to the internet and unexpectedly it becomes a meme. Matt realizes that he has lost control and, when in Trump's first election campaign the frog becomes a symbol of the ultra-right's hatred, he decides to confront it to recover the innocence of his creation. An incredible story that brings us closer to two absolutely current realities: the uncontrollable power of social networks and the social and political division of the USA (and the world). The history of social networks in the last twenty years and of the USA in the last ten, starting with an innocent frog who pulled down his pants in front of a toilet. Life is strange like that. See it to believe it. A visionary, current and necessary film, winner at Sundance.