We are pleased to announce the opening of Sockel, Anna Malagrida’s first solo exhibition in Berlin on June 28, 2013 at 7 pm.

In her exhibition, Malagrida shows photographs of the project Los Muros Hablaron (The Walls Spoke), in which she documents the social protest movements, like Movimiento 15M and Indignados, which occured in Spain in May 2011. Starting point of Los muros hablaron were blogs on the internet, which showed locations in Barcelona or Madrid where the demonstrations took place. As a first part of the project, the artist made notes of the texts, which the demonstrators had spray-painted and written on the walls in the streets. In a second part, Malagrida tried to find the actual places following the notes of her diary, but the day after those texts were already painted over or brushed away.

For the exhibition Malagrida published a newspaper which illustrates all the locations that have been photographed by her. The places have been marked in maps and the texts that could be read are documented. Malagrida studied in Barcelona and Arles and has been living in Paris since 2004. She first gained international recognition with her photo-series Point de Vue (2006) and Vitrinas (2008/9) as well as numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions. A defining element of her work lies in her ongoing examination of other media like painting and sculpture through her motifs and the emphasis on materials, without her work loosing the specific qualities of the photography. However, Malagrida is not limited to these medium references, her work involves numerous and multi-faceted layers of meaning. Charged by a dialectic of the exterior and the interior, of brightness and darkness, the works of Malagrida explore the act of seeing in an esthetic as well as politic way.

The photographs in our exhibition show socles of representative Spanish institutions such as banks, universities or political buildings on which only isolated traces of the texts are visible. It appears as though the written manifestations of anger and desperation disappear just as quickly as the mass of people that had occupied the streets only hours before. The project Los Muros Hablaron resists the elusiveness of censorship. The photographs from Malagrida transform the socles of the accused institutions into monuments of the protests and resistance. The chosen section emphasizes the materiality of the surface and allows the socles to emerge as stone sculptures.