Exhibitions
DISPUTE AND PAUSE: new scenographies for thinking about the contemporary
DISPUTE AND PAUSE is the final event of Art i Context 2023–2025 at IVAM, a program dedicated to supporting the production processes of a group of young artists connected to the Valencian context. This exhibition marks the close of the project's second edition, which continues the approach begun in the previous call for proposals (2021–2023). In that first edition, the final proposals of the selected artists were structured around what we then defined as "their particular here and now": a framework marked by the instability of the present and by the need to abstract a complex contemporary reality that shaped the imagination of an entire creative generation.
From November 14, 2020, to January 11, 2026, curated by Ali A. Maderuelo and Julia Castelló, and coordinated by Joan Ramon Escrivà and Yolanda Franco, the exhibition of the second edition of Art i Context —Bella Báguena, Pablo Bolumar, Juan de Dios Morenilla, Marco Henri, Gema Quiles, and Sandra Mar—demonstrated from the outset a clear desire to delve deeper into the installation aspects of their individual practices. At the same time, they showed a strong interest in developing a collective project focused on the joint configuration of the exhibition space.
The exhibition brings together the works of the six artists from the second edition of Art i Context, whose research expands installation art through profoundly diverse languages and sensibilities. Bella Báguena unfolds in Algo cayó (Something Fell) a sound garden of vase-speakers where intimacy, fragility, and transfeminine memory translate into a musical landscape somewhere between experimental and pop. Pablo Bolumar presents Canyar , a corporate parafiction that recreates the office of a fictional company dedicated to managing the presence of reeds on riverbanks, a multimedia installation where archive, design, and AI intersect to blur the boundaries between reality and speculation. In Studio Telling , Juan de Dios Morenilla constructs a walk-through diorama that transports the visitor to the psychological tensions of the artist's own studio, a space where public and private merge in a theatrical, pop, and surrealist style.
For his part, Marco Henri presents H-VC1JD , an immersive video installation that recontextualizes visual and sound material found online, activating new, phantasmagorical layers of meaning and exploring the object-like quality of sound and its chance relationship with the image. Gema Quiles proposes in El Banquete (The Banquet) an exuberant and critical scene, a festive garden where excess, consumption, and violence emerge beneath a playful appearance that questions contemporary fulfillment. Finally, Sandra Mar unfolds Los Encuentros (The Encounters ), a poetic journey in the form of a labyrinth of sculpture-texts, where clay, metal, and polystyrene give form to narratives about love, desire, and intimacy, inspired by the romantic memory of the gazebo.
In DISPUTE AND PAUSE. Art i Context , the six pieces were conceived from the program's inception, stemming from each artist's prior interests and influences that, in some cases, could be shared with the public through various activities. Staging acts as the common thread running through all the proposals, developed from diverse media and sensibilities. They encompass reflection on the everyday, the return of pictorial figuration, the evocation of the poetic, the use of trompe l'oeil, the construction of sound narratives, the relationships of human interdependence, and the discursive reinterpretation of natural materials, which function as interconnected symbolic refuges.
