Oriol Vilanova will signify Spain on the Venice Biennial in 2026 | Culture | EUROtoday

The artist Oriol Vilanova, born in Manresa and resident in Brussels, would be the consultant of Spain on the subsequent Venice Biennial. Will do it with the mission The stayscuired by Carles Guerra. “Vilanova embodies with her artistic practice a collecting eagerness who, judging by the referents of the past, is obsessed with putting the entire world in a museum. Luckily, the world is unbeatable and its work makes failure a remedy to which the remains are enough. Those remains materialize in the innumerable postal cards that they acquire in traces and markets of flea International Development Cooperation (AECID), in charge of the selection.

“My effort is to flee the cliché,” he confessed in an interview with Bea Espejo in 2017 for Babelia. By then it already had more than 34,000 postcards, an object that, for him, are “a way of each vacationer and political propaganda.” Vilanova collects these postcards since before devoting themselves to art, and have become a conceptual basis for their plays, facilities and performancessays the Aecid statement. The note also emphasizes that this enormous amount of postcards is “just like an antimuseum that responds to present issues with respect to the establishment that workouts as a mannequin of accumulation, preservation and valorization of the previous.” In the case of Oriol Vilanova, a “metabolic” museum arises, which is held on a habit maintained thanks to a modest but constant investment: its incessant traces walks and its obsessive purchases. The Spanish pavilion at the Venice Biennale will deploy the sum of all these accumulated materials for more than twenty years.

The jury has been composed of Santiago Herrero Amigo, director of Cultural and Scientific Relations of the AECID; Immaculate Ballesteros, Director of Programming of Spanish Cultural Action; Manuel Segade, director of the Reina Sofia National Art Museum; Agustín Pérez Rubio, Commissioner of the Pavilion of Spain on the Biennial of Venice 2024; Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum; Tania Pardo, director of the Dos de Mayo Art Center; Santiago Olmo, director of the Galego Center for Contemporary Art; Rosa Olivares, director of the journal Exit; and Ignasi Aballi, artist of the Pavilion of Spain on the Venice Biennial 2022. The Biennial will happen from May 9 to November 22, 2026.