Desbordamiento de Val de Omar exhibition at La Virreina

The moving picture as an educational tool. Far removed from big screen superproductions devoid of content, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge is rethinking cinema through the lens of popular education in six projects that are set to be exhibited between July and October.

Desbordamiento de Val de Omar

These four “in-house” productions include one organised in conjunction with the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and a project on the Cinématheque de Tànger. Using photography and experimental cinema they look at various types of culture that make up civil society.

The Pedagogical Missions of the Republic, which the photographs of José Val del Omar record in the exhibition Desbordamiento de Val de Omar (Val de Omar Overflow) are shown as the first initiative to favour cultural exchange during the time of the Second Republic.

La Virreina is showing one of his main film creations, Tríptic Elemental d’Espanya (Elemental Triptych of Spain), three shorts that merge the reality of Granada, Castile and Galicia with the artist’s poetic imagery.

Works like this, which are more hypnotic than narrative, reflect the technical evolution of this unknown artist, who went from recording missions to experimenting with new photographic and cinematographic equipment.

Palau de la Virreina -> La Rambla 99
www.virreina.bcn.cat

Xcèntric Festival at the CCCB’s cinema

From ecstasy to rage.

From ecstasy to rage. Fifty years of alternative Spanish cinema (“Del Éxtasis al arrebato. Cinquanta anys de l’altre cinema espanyol”) is the title of the exhibition that Xcèntric, the CCCB‘s season of experimental cinema, has brought about and which is currently taking place in Barcelona.

The project has already visited Melbourne’s ACMI, New York’s Anthology Film Archives and Washington’s National Gallery, and has been released in DVD box format.

This is a project that traces fifty years of experimental cinema made in Spain. It looks for affinities between different authors, often little acknowledged in official cinema history.

This is because the exhibition, whose exhibits have been selected by Antoni Pinent, enables us to find numerous directors regarded as “amateurs“, who in fact, when seen in the light of current work, become extremely interesting.

The exhibition, which take place during Xcèntric’s May sessions (on 11, 13, 16, 23 and 30), will allow us to view works by José Val del Omar, Manuel Huerga, Isaki Lacuesta and David Domingo, among many others.