Exhibitions
The art of navigating: cartographies of digital disorder
Fourteen artists to question the role of photography in the era of virtuality.
The Foto Colectania Foundation proposes an immersion in the role that images play in the digital environment. It does so with a collective exhibition that invites us to rethink how photography has ceased to be just a tool to represent the physical world and has become an interface that articulates, alters and even constructs the experience of moving around the internet and other virtual spaces. The exhibition brings together pieces by fourteen international artists and presents a critical look at this visual transformation that is part of our daily lives.
The exhibition, curated by Jon Uriarte and entitled The Art of Navigating. How to Get Lost in a World of Images, can be visited from tomorrow, June 12, until December 21, 2025. The selection of works covers areas as diverse as video games, online maps, social networks, space exploration and artificial intelligence. You can see proposals by Sara Bezovšek , James Bridle , Alan Butler , Josèfa Ntjam , Giath Taha , Kyriaki Goni , Roc Herms , Simon Weckert , among others.
Convertirse en fantasma, Giath Taha (2022). © Giath Taha
The idea of “navigating” has long since ceased to refer only to physical movement in a territory. Today, navigating also means moving through digital interfaces, following hyperlink routes, getting lost among windows and content that do not necessarily represent any specific reality, but often invent it. The digital image has gone from documenting a place or a moment, to being the environment itself: you click on it, you can drag it, enlarge it, modify it, and thus generate new ways of inhabiting the world. In this context, disorientation becomes almost a permanent condition. The acceleration of technologies, the mix between the physical and the virtual and the constant fragmentation of the visual landscape have generated a feeling of uncertainty that, far from being only negative, some artists explore as a form of resistance.
The title of the exhibition refers to an old navigation manual published under the Spanish monarchy in the 16th century. This reference serves to point out the persistence of colonial ideas also in the digital world, and at the same time to open a debate on how we can relate to images and the systems that sustain them from other points of view, less extractive and more open to complexity.
Paisaje marciano I, Kyriaki Goni (2022). © Kyriaki Goni i The Breeder
The exhibition program also includes a collaboration with Sónar+D 2025. Artist Simon Weckert has been chosen to present his work from June 12 to 14 in the Project Area, where art, innovation and technology intersect. This presence reinforces Foto Colectania's desire to explore how the image interacts with other creative and scientific fields, while consolidating one of its lines of work, the relationship between photography, society and emerging technologies.
El derecho al olvido, Esther Hovers (2021-2024). © Esther Hovers
