The Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Spain) hosts an exhibition devoted to the Centre Internacional de Fotografia Barcelona, CIFB. The CIFB was a short-lived experiment in the process of institutionalisation of photographic culture during Spain's democratic Transition. The current study of this experiment, little known and almost forgotten despite its nearness in time and space, should be understood from a double perspective: local and global.
On the one hand, this is a local study of a process that was taking place at an international level during the seventies: the re-composition of the cultural field within the new cultural industries following a post-industrial economic model. This was a moment of great expansion for the art market, with photography becoming part of it to an unprecedented degree. The seventies marked the beginning of a great international resurgence of institutions, festivals, academic programmes, galleries and publications that laid down the conditions for the interpenetration of culture and economy as it is known today.
On the other hand, this is a study of how such generalised historical conditions took on a specific, local and very concrete form in the field of photography in Barcelona during the Transition. In this sense, the study sheds a different light on the period, allowing us to understand how disparate photographic practices and traditions, which have since become separate, were able to coexist at the time.
Date: until May 20.
Location: Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). Plaça dels Àngels, 1. 08001 Barcelona. Spain
Opening hours: Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, from 11am to 7.30pm. Saturdays, from 10am to 8pm. Sundays, from 10am to 3pm.
CAC de Málaga hosts the largest exhibition of Vik Muniz' work ever held in Europe
through December 2
Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880-1910
from July 14 to October 14.
