Exhibitions
Subverting exhibition, anti-curating
From October 23, 2025 to January 18, 2026, curated by Espai Rampa, a platform dedicated to research and production in the field of contemporary art.
It is with this term, anti-curatorial, that the Study Group (also) defines its practice, a collective of artists, performers and curators founded during the old pandemic years by former students of the Escola Massana who are now in their 30s, although there are new additions under 22 and over 40. The term (also) refers to other actions and methods embraced by this group: they catalogue and propose new formats for the public presentation of artistic productions and engage in institutional criticism, satire, meta-art and activations that challenge the art world itself. We can say that they have come to subvert everything, or at least put it in tension: what is shown, the institution that hosts it, the discourse that emerges from it and even the processes of artistic call and selection. They have a lot of work to do.
The La Caixa grant they obtained in 2020 helped them publish a (free) book called Exhibition View , which is a compendium of exhibitions that they find interesting. When promoting it, they decided to come up with new forms of presentation, which would complement and expand the content itself and, for example, they did a residency in space 2 of the Àngels Barcelona gallery. Their residency was the management of the room throughout the summer of 2021. Frenetic activity of workshops, concerts, exhibitions, express calls (PLINTON Flash Residency) for twenty-four-hour residencies with a final exhibition where the managers themselves did not know what would be seen. Some clues from the anti-curatorship, perhaps.
At Espai Rampa we will see Caixa sorpresa, an exhibition (?) that is also an investigation into surprise and an aesthetic, methodological and political exploration of surprise. Grup d'Estudi will play with tempos that are not typical of bureaucracy and will play with surprising results that aim to circumvent censorship. They say it will be a living room. They explain that the only thing that can be explained so far is the central presence of an exhibition device, which will be a piece and a work, a box within a box, which can hide and reveal all kinds of exhibitions.
The person who will create this centerpiece is Estructuras 3000, which is, according to its own definition on its website, a non-profit association whose objective is to carry out, monitor and disseminate collective and collaborative practices in the Catalan artistic and cultural context.
What exhibitions this device will hide and reveal remains in the realm of the unknown and will be resolved through four calls that Grup d'Estudi plans to launch in the summer. They will be experimental calls, selection processes governed by fun and absurd bases also as a criticism of the current calls. Subvert, exaggerate what is happening and force the tension. Put ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves if we know how to see ourselves.
