Gloria Oyarzábal’s work examines colonial property rights over bodies and cultural artefacts as a foundational element of museums.

The concept of the ​​museum was created 300 years ago as a space where monarchs or emperors could open their collections to the public. The arguments that supported colonial looting with the excuse of exploration and spiritual salvation fed the exoticism which was a product of the supremacist discourse. Since then, the elements exhibited in cultural institutions and their architectures have become part of the collective identity of many countries. When works and artefacts come from plundering, as is the case in most Western museums, notions about history, knowledge, ethics or collective and individual memory come into conflict.

Oyarzábal’s installation intertwines reproductions of archive materials, photographs taken in ethnographic museums, and reinterpretations of the painting La blanche et la noire by the Swiss painter Félix Vallotton (1913). The different versions of the painting, which discard the pictorial exoticism of their predecessors, include recent publications about the looting and restitution of works of art by European museums. Images printed on fabric and mounted on a modular structure overlap each other, creating a new visual narrative that addresses issues of race, gender and colonial pillage.

Born in London in 1971, she holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid, where she lives. She divides her professional activity between film, photography and teaching. She was programmer and co-founder of the independent film theater La Enana Marrón, in Madrid (1999-2009), dedicated to the diffusion of auteur, experimental and alternative cinema. She spent 3 years in Bamako (Mali) researching on the construction of the idea of Africa, the processes of colonization and decolonization or the diverse voices around African feminisms. In 2017, she was selected for an artistic residency in Nigeria, which allowed her to develop her research on the colonization of the concept of women. Since 1996 she has been working as an art director and still photographer for short films and experimental documentaries. Her work has been exhibited in Lagos Photo (Nigeria), Athens Photo (Greece), PhototoEspaña, Format Festival (UK), Thessaloniki Museum of Photography (Greece), Bitume Festival Lecce (Italy), Encontros da Imagem de Braga (Portugal), Odessa PhotoDays (Ukraine), Organ Vida (Croatia) or Kaunas Foto (Lithuania), among others. Some of the awards she has received are the Landskrona Dummy Award (Sweden), Discovery Award Encontros da Imagem (Portugal), Fotofestiwal GrandPrix (Poland), Images Vevey Photobook Award (Switzerland) or the Aperture Paris Photo Best Photobook of the Year.

Gloria Oyarzábal (Madrid, 1971)
Usus Fructus Abusus (La blanche et la noire)

2022 Edition
Open Call winner
Indoor and outdoor installations
Venues: Romo Kultur Etxea and Restaurante Tellagorri
Collaborators: Picter, RKE and Restaurante Tellagorri