Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

The exhibition A darkly alive world by artist Regina de Miguel invites us to imagine an extraplanetary museum that was unsuccessfully terraformed centuries ago—a memorial to a failed space utopia. The Tornus Museum is set in a future where museums—with their discourses meant to give meaning to progress and as centers for educating the colonizing gaze of a world governed by a select few—have completely lost their meaning. What remains is an archive aware of its incompleteness, its contamination, and its complicity with the slow violence that permeates the universe.

In the first part, the Telluric Archive of Tornus is conceived as an artificial swamp where life, waste, data, and matter intermingle in the form of drawings and sculptures from various fictional museums or archives, along with geological elements to be analyzed. The second part consists of the newly produced audiovisual essay Poisoned Waters,  Comets Never Seen Again, A Gathering of Suicides, 2026.

It tells the story of a scientist trapped in a pandemic, leading us into an emotional exploration of anxiety, ecological guilt, data overload, and the difficulty of imagining a future. In this essay, various sites in Puerto Rico—such as the Arecibo Observatory, coral farms, and marshes—become examples of a form of governance that gradually renders certain territories and bodies unlivable through the cumulative effect of military, economic, and scientific decisions imposed upon them.

The Galactic Museum project continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of our extractivist ambition—not only terrestrial but cosmic—and its possible future scenarios. It is constructed as an interior from which to view the reflection of our ways of life. In Tornus, political imagination shifts from a progressive flight to the far more pertinent question of how to inhabit a damaged system.

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Joana Vasconcelos (Lisbon, 1971) has established herself in recent decades as a key figure in contemporary sculpture and installation art, participating in major international events and circuits dedicated to the promotion of art. In this regard, she has participated in two editions of the Venice Biennale, presenting A Noiva (The Bride) in 2005—a large chandelier made from approximately 14,000 tampons—and Trafaria Praia in 2013, a Portuguese ferry transformed into a floating national pavilion. Vasconcelos has also participated in the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (Japan, 2006), which explored the relationship between art, landscape, and territory. Throughout her career, she has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as the 2011 exhibition organized by the François Pinault Foundation, titled The World Belongs to You, at the Palazzo Grassi; her 2012 installation at the Palace of Versailles; and in 2018, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao hosted I’m your Mirror, the first major retrospective dedicated to the artist in Spain.

Her work has also been featured in prominent museums and art centers such as the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Manchester Art Gallery, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, the Kunsthal Rotterdam, the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, the Uffizi Galleries in Florence, and the Palazzo Pitti, among many other internationally renowned institutions.

Joana Vasconcelos’s work has been characterized by her transformation of everyday objects linked to stereotypes created by consumer society into monumental installations of great visual impact. Through the deliberate use of irony and ambiguity, these pieces take on multiple symbolic, social, and political meanings. From an ideological rather than a feminist perspective, the artist reflects on the construction of identity, the roles assigned to women in the domestic and public spheres, and the contradictions inherent in the globalized world through an aesthetic that the artist herself defines as a “feminine voice.”

The IVAM has chosen to recognize her work and career by awarding her the 2026 Julio González Prize, an award sponsored by the Generalitat Valenciana and the IVAM that pays tribute to one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century. Since 2000, this distinction has been bestowed upon prominent international artists such as Georg Baselitz, Cy Twombly, Anish Kapoor, Eduardo Chillida, Markus Lüpertz, Robert Rauschenberg, Anthony Caro, Pierre Soulages, Miquel Navarro, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Bernar Venet, Christian Boltanski, Andreu Alfaro, Annette Messager, Mona Hatoum, Carmen Calvo, and Simone Fattal have been honored with this distinction, establishing it as one of the most prestigious awards in contemporary art.

In this context, Joana Vasconcelos faithfully embodies the values of innovation, experimentation, and renewal of the language of sculpture that characterized the work and legacy of Julio González. As is traditional for recipients of this award, the museum is dedicating a solo exhibition to her that offers a deeper look into her complex career and creative processes.

On this occasion, a selection of key works from her artistic output will be on display, alongside a new piece conceived specifically by Joana Vasconcelos for the IVAM, establishing a direct dialogue between the past and the present in her artistic practice. Valkyria Amparo is part of the series that Joana Vasconcelos began in 2004, drawing inspiration from Norse mythology, and consists of large textile sculptures that invade and transform the architectural space, symbolizing a feminine presence in the museum in an organic way, challenging the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts; this work was created by the artist to become part of the collection.

This exhibition brings together the latest productions by Mexican-British artist Melanie Smith: Estudios para ajolote (2025) and Tixinda (2025).

Both projects revolve around two endangered animals: on the one hand, the Ambystoma mexicanum, also known as the Mexican Axolotl, an amphibian endemic to the Valley of Mexico, of which between 500 and 1,000 individuals remain in their natural habitat; and on the other, the Plicopurpura pansa, or purple snail, an animal that has historically dyed fabrics purple in different geographical areas and today only inhabits, in danger, the coasts of Oaxaca in Mexico.

Under the question of gaze and image, the artist searches in different media such as painting, drawing, video, and sculpture ways to approach these forms of life without generating deterministic representations. These are journeys through different scales of vision and perspectives that allow the artist to play with representations in order to propose an approach that connects the audience with the animal’s own agency, from its corporeality, its plasticity, its color, in a phrase, from its way of existing.

With these works, Smith articulates a series of questions about the relationship between culture and nature, questioning the idea of separation and overcoming an ontological hierarchy of living beings, evoking a poetics that invites another way of looking, perhaps more empathetic, more curious, which seeks, within the limits of art itself, to learn from the other beings with whom we live. A learning process where the only strange thing is to think as before.

Apoteosis Now is a project from which Cristina de Middel’s photographs are projected onto the museum. Images loaded with facts, intuitions, myths, uncertainties, mutations, visions, totems, and some taboos. An exhibition in Cataract mode, a term the artist uses to define the cascade of images to which this era subjects us, and at the same time, that eye disease that prevents us from seeing them clearly.

Each series here behaves like a small treatise on iconography, a visual novel, a seismograph on the manipulation of reality. And each work can be read as an archive of dreams or as a record of the obstacles that prevent their realization.

Apoteosis Now is set in a world after the end of post-history. Just three decades after the era of yawn, prophesied by Francis Fukuyama, failed without hesitation. And that, at last, we were bored with a boredom that never came.

Without beginning or end, and under a chaotic appearance, in this atmosphere there is, however, an order: of meaning, of intention in the change it proposes for photography, of chromatic treatment, of impact on those who fall into it.

If the Apocalypse inevitably leads us to the abyss, the Apotheosis includes ways to dodge it in this era ruled by Iconocracy. At a time when Cristina de Middel warns us that the avalanche of photographs offered to us is as dangerous as those that are usurped from us. From this conviction, Apoteosis Now conveys that images can not only be used to subjugate us, but also to offer us instruments capable of liberating us: ourselves and our gaze.

Te llamo cuerpo [I Call You Body] is part of the exhibition series Territories in Transit / Solo Duo, a platform for exchange and visibility that connects artists from different institutional and geographical contexts. Each edition sets two artists in dialogue – one invited by a partner institution, one based in the Comunitat Valenciana – their exchange unfolding across two venues and two exhibition periods. This format encourages the cross-pollination of perspectives, languages and territories, building collaborative networks that extend the reach of contemporary artistic practice.

Te llamo cuerpo brings the artistic practices of Marco Giordano and Irene Grau into dialogue. At its heart lies the relationship and tension between the body and the more-than-human world – a broad horizon that takes in plant and mineral species alongside the infrastructures woven into our urban ecosystems. The exhibition title speaks to the act of recognising more-than-human elements, whether natural or artificial, as bodies – subjects with an essence of their own, with which we might enter into contact. Each artist approaches this relational dynamic through distinct positions, methods and techniques.

For Irene Grau, her own body is the medium through which she enters into dialogue with the natural landscape – traversing it, inhabiting it, drawing on it as raw material for a coherent artistic practice. Her works are often the outcome of performative actions: not simply traces or records of these processes, but systems in which natural matter becomes a vocabulary in conversation with the history of painting and landscape. In Marco Giordano’s practice, the body is never displayed but always implied. His work begins with word, sound and material, reassembling them into an intrinsically performative sculptural language, and frequently involves the recomposition and transformation of matter as an act that interrogates contemporary social phenomena – and the political frictions they reveal.

Te llamo cuerpo brings together existing works by both artists alongside new productions made specifically for the museum’s spaces, spanning painting, photography, sculpture and installation.

Irene Grau presents a selection of works from two series: brillo abrigo (2024) and A hierro (2023–2024). In the latter, Grau works outward from her own body towards nature, etching and staining canvases with rust and water. She uses physical force to drag the fabrics across the ground, turning grass into countless brushes that mark the surface – capturing the labour of miners at work. All that force is held in the surface of the work, alongside the delicacy of water. The landscape paints itself. Abrigo was made in the surroundings of Altamira and is rooted in two essential questions: the presence of water through movement, and the possibility of understanding oneself as a place of shelter. These series will be accompanied by a new production made from the dust generated in the manufacture of ceramic tiles in the Castellón area.

Marco Giordano constructs a new ecosystem by bringing different bodies of work into dialogue, with the large-scale sculptural installation Gridlocks (2026) as its centrepiece. These sculptures are composed of assemblages of aluminium, copper, fibreglass and plastic – the materials of energy infrastructure, bodies that are often invisible within our cities. Made from cabling salvaged during dismantling works in Glasgow, this series marks the first stage of a long-term inquiry into energy transition and the systems of production and extraction that underpin it.

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What would happen if a museum allowed visitors to peer underground? What if, by pulling on a corner, a hidden, complex, and vibrant world emerged, normally relegated to invisibility? Radix suggests this possibility through an ecological fabulation that shifts the gaze toward the depths of history, culture, and the memories of the subsoil.

Tania Candiani’s project imagines a fictional biome inhabited by entities that oscillate between the scientific and the speculative, between the observable and the imagined. It is presented as an immersive installation conceived as a hybrid ecosystem, where living plants, blown-glass sculptures, suspended organisms, a root-tron (a device that allows observation of root growth), audiovisual projections in cross-dialogue, and an octophonic sound composition that envelops the space coexist. Each of these elements functions as a fragment of a larger, interdependent system, where the separation between the living and the inert is erased.

The exhibition space is architecturally transformed to adopt a smooth, radial geometry, inspired by the cross-section of a plant structure found in a book from the Botanical Garden of Valencia. This spatial configuration acts not merely as a container, but as a body in itself, an expanded anatomy that suggests the presence of an imagined plant, a possible life form that could belong—or have belonged—to the Valencian territory, but whose origin remains uncertain, suspended between botanical memory and science fiction.

In this sense, Radix does not seek to represent nature as we know it, but rather to speculate on its possible mutations, microworlds, and futures, inviting us to reconsider the boundaries between species, disciplines, and states of matter, as well as to reflect on the invisible forces that sustain life, fostering an awareness of the hidden networks both above and below ground.

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This exhibition proposes an approach to the Albufera of Valencia, a coastal lagoon and one of the most significant wetlands in the western Mediterranean, understood not merely as a physical or geographical space, but as the result of a superimposition of layers corresponding to the successive and changing historical, economic, and environmental circumstances that have shaped this place. The Albufera is interpreted here from its post-natural condition, where culture and nature are articulated within a system of interrelations and tensions between the human and the non-human.

The exhibition is structured as a journey through representations of the Albufera from the mid-19th century to the present day, through various groups of works and documentation. It presents the photographic project L’Albufera. Visió tangencial (1985), a pioneering initiative promoted by the IVAM in the years prior to its opening. In this sense, the IVAM establishes a dialogue with its own genealogy and assumes an active role as an agent fostering artistic research—beyond curatorial practice—by supporting the development of six works created specifically for this exhibition by Bleda y Rosa, Paula García-Masedo, Lucía Loren, Teresa Marín, Jorge Ribalta, and Jorge Yeregui. The four-decade gap between both projects allows us to observe both the transformations of the landscape and the changes in the ways of researching and representing a place through artistic practice.

Alongside these proposals, the exhibition brings together representations of the Albufera from the mid-19th century to the present through photographs, documents, and artistic works that make it possible to explore different ways of inhabiting, imagining, exploring, or protecting this unique ecosystem. From the romantic imaginaries of the 19th century and traditional agricultural uses to tourism expansion, industrialization, environmental activism, and the contemporary challenges arising from the ecosocial crisis, the exhibition gathers traces, narratives, and vestiges that reveal the multiple layers shaping the Albufera and invite reflection on the possible futures of this shared territory.

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