«5 fotógrafas en la Colección Banco Sabadell» (Alicante)
Banco Sabadell Auditorium. Alicante
The five photographs by Hannah Collins, Cristina de Middel, Isabel Muñoz, Montserrat Soto and Mayte Vieta are as much about the idea as they are about the image: they are representations of the object or subject as perceived by the photographers and which have remained in their minds.
Hannah Collins’s vision of the city of Barcelona – a photograph from 2006 belonging to the series "True Stories" – is all-seeing and contemplative, a moment of understanding the city as she hovers above its vicissitudes.
For her part, Cristina de Middel transports us to the beach at Ouidah, in Benin, a West African country where the divine presence of Èsû is found—a term that can be translated as ‘sphere’, the representation of the infinite according to the Yoruba religion.
In the case of Isabel Muñoz, the setting is the body and, in this series (Mevlevi), the body during a whirling ceremony of Turkish dance and meditation, a spiritual ascent towards truth and mystical ecstasy.
Guided by Jorge Luis Borges, Montserrat Soto transports us to Dante’s hell; a hell immersed in a nebula of greens and blues, devoid of blacks, like the one that the blind Borges claims he is able to imagine. Familiar and remembered landscapes, repositories of all fears, a place of despair.
Finally, Mayte Vieta portrays herself in awe of the sheer splendour of nature, in what appears to be a new version of Caspar David Friedrich’s "he Monk by the Sea" and the sublime experience of the landscape.
The city, nature, the body and hell. Different places, real or imagined, in which the power of things comes into play: mythical and religious reality, vivid dreams, the supernatural and the mysterious, knowledge and the desire for the whole. Disparate images, yet all imbued with an indecipherable sign that makes us feel part of the world and belonging to it, even if only for a brief moment.
