Infinita/Unfinished. Poetics of fatigue
Curated by Beatriz Escudero and Eloy Fernández-Porta
Unproductivity, immobility, loss, times of transition and times of closure are some of the themes addressed by Camila Cañeque. Her body of artwork, produced over a period of twelve years starting in 2012, expanded into five creative fields: performance, installation, photography, object art and writing. This exhibition provides an excellent sample of her oeuvre, offering the public a representative selection of her works, notably performance videos. In reviving an old project sketched for La Capella, we showcase the work of Cañeque, one of the most remarkable artists of her generation, for as she herself said, no page is ever the last.
Camila Cañeque (Barcelona, 1984 – Barcelona, 2024) explored the weariness of our contemporary landscapes through performance projects, installations, objects and writings. Making figurative use of the vocabulary of consumer societies and more abstract compositions, her artistic practice is an ode to inactivity, the B side of our accelerated and hyperconnected times, the other face in which silence, quietude and the uninhabited abound, revealing a multifaceted exhaustion, a hangover that is historical as well as physical, political and environmental.
Cañeque showed or performed her works in spaces such as the Galeria Vermelho (São Paulo), Microscope Gallery (NY), The Kitchen (NY), Kulturhuset (Stockholm), CaixaForum (Barcelona), Galeria Joan Prats, La Virreina, Lucía Mendoza (Madrid), Glasshouse Project (NY), Queens Museum (NY), Museo Lázaro Galdiano (Madrid) and La Juan Gallery (Madrid). She participated in a number of residencies, among them at Mana Contemporary (New Jersey), Nida Art Colony (Lithuania), NauEstruch, Fabra i Coats (Barcelona), Largo das Artes (Río de Janeiro) and Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik – ZK/U (Berlin). She was awarded the CREA research grant by the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, was shortlisted for the Miquel Casablancas Prize and won the Exchange grant awarded by Homesession.
She taught workshops and gave talks at SUNY (NY), Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), Can Felipa (Barcelona) and other institutions. Her work has been reviewed in publications such as Artsy, OFFICE Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Journal, BOMB, El País, La Vanguardia, El Periódico de Esen and the Emergency Index, published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
Her writings include two texts written for La Capella projects: El motor inmóvil’, for Otra luz cegadora by Diego Paonessa; and ‘Correspondencias simbólicas entre folklore católico y música mákina en el casco antiguo de Barcelona’, for the project of the same title by Marc O’Callaghan. Her other published writings include the articles ‘Los olvidantes’, in the collective volume Olvidar/Forgetting (Brumaria), ‘Compartir intemperie’, in Jot Down, and ‘Bach, bachata’, in Oral, and the essay La última frase (La uña rota, 2024).