We continue our summer agenda for art-contact being another way of recharging batteries. Summer is the ideal time to enjoy culture and art in a more relaxed way, outside the rush of the rest of the year.

MADRID

The Gaviria Palace hosts until September 15th an extraordinary exhibition dedicated to Liu Bolin under the title "The invisible man". This Shandong-born creator started his career in the world of sculpture but soon began to explore the power of photography, performance and installation to channel his artistic concerns. The title of the exhibition refers to the work the author has developed around the mimicry and the gimmicky works in which he seems to merge with the environment. The result is a large format photograph that deceives our senses and forces us to look twice to understand what we are really seeing. Within this line, his series "Migrants" involves other people on the scene and merges them with the beaches and boats that constitute their harsh reality, what proposes a double game between metaphorical invisibility and the real invisibility of this type of human conflicts.

Liu Bolin, "Green food"

GIJÓN

LABoral Center for Art and Industrial Creation presents “Eco-visionarios”, a contemporary creation project carried out in collaboration with other institutions: Bildmuseet of Umeå (Sweden), House of Electronic Arts (HeK) of Basel (Switzerland), MAAT- Museum of Art and Architecture of Lisbon (Portugal), to which Matadero Madrid and the Royal Academy of Arts in London have recently joined. The objective of this initiative, which has already been running for two years, is to analyse from an artistic perspective the environmental challenges that appear the society of our time, taking as a starting point the principles that underlie the activity of each of the institutions involved. Thus, after addressing the issue giving priority to approaches such as the relationship between art and ecology, the emergence of sustainable architecture, or the link between art and technology; LABoral delves into the biosphere-technosphere connection, with transversal works that interrelate art, science, technology and society. To the Gijón program, the activities of the Nave16 of Matadero Madrid add.

BILBAO

The Guggenheim Bilbao welcomes the work of Jenny Holzer under the title "Lo indescriptible." This American author began her career in painting but soon perceived that this medium was insufficient for her artistic purposes. She became then interested in public art and writing. Because language contains the enormous power to transform, to understand multiple messages, to host numerous philosophical and political positions. In the new millennium, Holzer went from the use of others’ texts to her own literary production. The visual and aesthetic game between content and container is constant in her work. The media gets diverse, and the power of speech enhances. Throughout her career, she has resorted to everyday materials with projects that interact directly with the public (messages on posters, wrappers, products ...) and also to more durable works, with headlines and lines engraved in stone, lighted signs and a long etcetera. This exhibition presents an extensive tour of her work, to understand the scope of her messages and participate in the same critical discourse.

Jenny Holzer, "For Bilbao"

MÁLAGA

After the enormous success reaped by this exhibition in Madrid, “An unauthorised exhibition” arrives at La Térmica. It is a selection of works by the controversial Banksy contributed by private collectors. Surrounded still by mystery and anonymity, this urban artist has earned the recognition of critics and the public with transgressive works of a witty message that always pose an open criticism of the established system. Every proposal is a question that challenges the viewer, to rethink the schemes inherited from our society and our capitalist market.

PALMA DE MALLORCA

Plessi's universe takes over Es Baluards this summer. Fabrizio Plessi, an artist who arrived in Palma in 1989 to stay, made the island his place of work, where he took root and built a net of interwoven relationships with his work and his fascination for new disciplines. Captivated by video art since its inception, his passage through Palma on the cusp of his career was a creative impulse of great depth. He mixed the baroque inherited from Italy with spiritualised minimalism that gave him the serenity of the place. His work continually resorts to some fundamental themes, which face life from a humanistic perspective. Essential issues such as time and space, light and object, awareness of sustainability, the vision of the Mediterranean as a cultural link... The exhibition includes a large part of his author books and videos related to their stories, to generate a multisensory visitor experience. Until September 1st.

Fabrizio Plessi, Digital Wall (Acqua 6), 2018

BURGOS

The CAB of Burgos holds two interesting samples with a clear sensory vocation. We start with "PERturbacións", by Christian Villamide (Lugo, 1966). With pieces of painting, sculpture and photography, this project is about the detachment that human beings currently live concerning their natural environment. The spaces previously occupied by natural ecosystems are buried by urban progress. The distance created with respect to a context that should be the closest and most organic gives rise to progressive mechanisation of interactions, a division of spaces, with human interventions that are often forgotten over time.

Kitazu&Gomez, "Anchovy Freak", 2007-2015

On the other hand, we highlight the exhibition ‘Haggish Flash’, of the group formed by Jesús Gómez (Burgos, 1962) and Megumi Kitazu (Tokushima, 1975). Both artists met in Berlin in 2001, and since then they have shared lines of work upon aspects of contemporary everyday life based on their personal experiences. Using a fictitious ice cream brand as a pretext, Kitazu & Gomez address issues such as sexual identity, multiculturalism, the relationship between marketing and art... The collection brings together paintings and installations where they use materials of all kinds and incorporate digital techniques.

ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. PERFORMANCE CYCLE X ART MADRID'26

Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.

PERFORMANCE: ALTA FACTURA. BY COLECTIVO LA BURRA NEGRA

March 4 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

"Discipline for Power.” Performance by La Burra Negra for Displacement of the Congress of Deputies by Roger Bernat. 2025.

Alta Factura subverts the conventional structure of the fashion runway to foreground the often-invisible processes that underpin artistic production. Through a series of conceptual textile works, the performance draws attention to the discipline of craft and the artist’s vulnerability, ultimately revealing those seams typically consigned to the margins, behind the scenes.

Colectivo La Burra Negra.

ABOUT EL COLECTIVO LA BURRA NEGRA

La Burra Negra is a nomadic performance art collective based in Málaga, founded in 2024 following its first residency in Totalán. The group is self-managed by Ascensión Soto Fernández, Gabriela Feldman de la Rocha, Sasha Camila Falcke, Sara Gema Domínguez Castillo, Sofía Barco Sánchez, and Regina Lagos González—six artists from diverse backgrounds and trajectories who met at the Hospital de Artistas at La Juan Gallery.

The collective brings together practitioners working across jewelry, painting, the performing arts, music, dance, cultural mediation, and arts management. Its activities include an annual residency in Totalán, the production of performative works, cultural mediation initiatives, and site-responsive interventions.

Since its inception, the collective has participated in the Periscopio series at La Térmica; presented A granel at the MVA in Málaga; carried out a number of actions in Totalán—the most recent during its second annual residency—and contributed its own proposals to the performance Displacement of the Congress of Deputies by Roger Bernat in Madrid.

At the core of La Burra Negra lies a commitment to collective creation and the exchange of knowledge. United in their effort to experiment with and disseminate performance art, the group explores the invisible dimensions of artistic labor—its temporalities, efforts, and relational dynamics, which so often remain unseen—as a form of critical affirmation.

Their practice emerges from dialogue and shared reflection, in the pursuit of decentralized spaces where art can be experienced and its processes made visible. Each residency and each action becomes an attempt to inhabit creation collectively, challenging conditions of precarity while fostering networks of care and collaboration that sustain both their own practice and that of those around them.