Exhibitions
Anna Irina Russell: elastic as a lung
A living and inflatable installation in Tabakalera.
Artist Anna Irina Russell (Barcelona, 1993) has long worked with sculptures and installations that escape from the usual channels of communication. To do so, Russell has used play as a tool to explore and disrupt certain codes, turning it into a kind of laboratory where rules are questioned and reformulated. In recent years, she has been particularly interested in soft materials and inflatable structures, inspired by how some animals use physical mechanisms to communicate or defend themselves, whether by swelling, growing or altering their bodies to say something.
This interest takes shape in Birika keinta elastikoa (Elastic as a lung), a proposal created for a new edition of Situ-akzioak, the project promoted by Tabakalera that aims to rethink how we relate to contemporary art. The exhibition has been developed with the collaboration of the IPI Karmengo Ama and Herrera Ikastetxea schools, as well as a group of families, in a clear commitment to linking the artistic world with the community and with education from a playful and participatory perspective.
Birika bezain elastikoa, Anna Irina Russell. Cortesia de Tabakalera.
Installed between April 10 and July 27, 2025, the exhibition proposes a soft and flexible environment that changes as visitors enter, move and inhabit it. The space is presented as a living organism, which expands and contracts according to the rhythm of the bodies that explore it. Russell invites us to become an active part of this collective sculpture, in which air —understood not only as a physical element, but as a relational medium— becomes the central axis, with movement, contact and gesture being the ones that communicate.
Situ-akzioak, which in previous editions has featured artists such as Julio Le Parc or María Jerez and has received more than 69,000 visitors, thus maintains its commitment to a more open and less rigid way of understanding art. With Birika keinan elastikoa (Elastic like a lung), the cultural center reinforces its line of offering spaces that rethink how we experience museums.
Birika bezain elastikoa, Anna Irina Russell. Cortesia de Tabakalera.
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