The Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró is an exhibition programme of emerging artistic and curatorial practices set up to meet Joan Miró's desire to create a space where new generations could present their work. Since its launch in 1978 in the foundation's Espai 10, our programme of emerging art has built up an extensive background in promoting local, national and international talent. Over the years, Espai 13 has become a veritable turning point in the artistic and professional careers of many of its participants, for whom it has represented a major leap forwards in terms of their professionalisation and recognition within the art world.
Through the Espai 13, as an observatory and barometer of the evolution of emerging art, the curatorship of a season of four solo shows based on a theme connected with contemporary artistic practice is commissioned every year. In 2023, the Yaby duo of curators was entrusted with the selection of the participating artists based on a commission to develop a season around the role of reading and its devices in their practice. What texts are the artists reading? And what is their approach and attitude as they do so? How are they deconstructing the written word as a cultural construct and the canon of literature and theory?
«Fixations per Minute» is a programme of four exhibitions that explores the concept of reading and its connection with current artistic practices by means of a selection of works by artists on the local and international scenes.
Grounded in the proposition of continuing to address the diverse questions affecting emerging art, for its 2022 programme the Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró presents Dive and Immersion, an exhibition series curated by Pere Llobera, with artistic proposals by Victor Jaenada, Marcel Rubio Juliana, Marria Pratts and Martín Vitaliti.
Turn it all turns is an educational project and series of four exhibitions that focuses on a range of processes and protocols that enable us to understand, relate to and experiment with our immediate surroundings. By playing with languages and meanings, the series aims to throw up critical insights that make us question the codes that shape our perception.
The artists featured in this series question and push at the boundaries between disciplines in order to reflect on the dynamics of power that affect knowledge. Thus, art is presented as a powerful monster capable of pointing to the weak points in these boundaries: a monster who tells the truth or, at the very least, who points to the person telling it.
The exhibition program The Possibility of an Island explores some of the symbolic and socio-cultural meanings that islands - those paradigmatic spaces in our collective imagination - have had over the course of time, with the aim of raising questions and reflections about these meanings that may be pertinent to our contemporary context.
The 2016-17 programme of exhibitions at Espai 13 presents six projects by artists who are working from the periphery of the usual circuits of contemporary art in Barcelona.
When Lines are Time is the exhibition program for the 2015-2016 season at the Fundació Joan Miró’s Espai 13. This transversal project curated by Martí Manen reflects on aspects related to temporality and production in artistic practices.
Stories, told through words, pictures or gestures, may be the most enduring form of communication known to humans. More than simply a listing of events, a story can transcend barriers of cultural diversity, geography and time period to explain how or why something came to be.
Implicit Sound is the second cycle of exhibitions for Espai 13 curated by multidisciplinary artist TRES. The title of the project not only stresses its connection with the previous Espai 13 cycle, Explicit Silence, but also reflects visual artists' growing interest in using sound in their work.
The exploration of silence is a constant factor in contemporary art. Twentieth-century artists from Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp to Yves Klein and Gary Hill - plus a great many others - have exemplified silence, reduction, nothingness, pause, absence, disappearance, invisibility, emptiness, non-action and negation. Silence, however, is still an open space with a lot of artistic potential to be explored.
