SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA, Spain — “O home na praza e a muller na casa” (“The man in the square and the woman in the home”) is certainly one of many misogynistic expressions that had been frequent in Spain throughout the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. It comes from an period when girls’s conduct, motion, and morals had been strictly contained and managed within the title of conventional values and patriotism, and displays an insistence on the erasure of ladies from public house.
This saying and a number of other equally sexist ones seem in Mar Caldas’s “Guía postal de Lugo (1936–1976)” (2014/2024), a wall set up wherein the phrases hover over black and white photographs of ladies working in locations equivalent to pharmacies, markets, hospitals, and canneries.
This piece opens Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria (Mar Caldas: Girls, Work, and Reminiscence) on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea. It’s an apt introduction to the Galician artist and educator’s layered observe. Because the Nineties, Caldas has fused analysis, images, video, and set up to acknowledge and vindicate untold tales of ladies’s lives and labor. Curator Monse Cea writes that Francoist refrains like those on this piece “continue to mock us to this day,” however by shining a highlight on the indispensable function of ladies’s work inside and outdoors the house in bigger society, Caldas reveals that girls have lengthy defied their message.
Set up view of photograph portraits of ladies in Spain’s Galicia area in Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
The exhibition of latest work begins with Caldas’s images collection Facedoras de Bueu (Makers of Bueu) and Facedoras do Baixo Miño (Makers of the Decrease Miño), each of which depict girls staff across the southern Galicia area of Spain. Her portraits seize farmers, lace makers, seaweed collectors, caretakers, and others within the picturesque inexperienced countryside, previous city quarters, and seaside villages that make the area such a well-liked vacationer vacation spot.
Actually, Galicia’s native economies and social welfare have been fueled for generations by girls like these, whose labor has additionally traditionally been neglected and under-compensated. In these large-scale, rigorously constructed photographs, the ladies pose triumphantly in compositions that mimic well-known work by canonical European artists like Velázquez and Goya. In “Esfolladora de millo” (Corn Husker) (2018), an older girl stands at middle of the body clasping ears of corn to her chest, their husks flaring out from her physique like wings. Her severe, regular gaze reveals us that she refuses to be ignored, and that she is rightfully happy with her labor. Not fairly documentary photos, the images are nonetheless a considerate celebration of the vibrancy and dignity of those girls.
Set up view of Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
The second half of this transferring present is devoted to Caldas’s challenge Retrato de familia (“Family Portrait”) (2023–24), commissioned by the museum. Right here, the artist additionally attracts on her circle of relatives’s traumatic historical past — her grandfather, a socialist union chief in Vigo, Spain, was executed by firing squad in 1937 — to discover private and collective experiences of violence and reminiscence.
Mar Caldas, work from the Sementes collection (2024)
Mar Caldas, “Carmen Nogueira Martínez (Mamacarmen)” from the Sementes collection (2024)
Element of archival materials in Mar Caldas’s Retrato de familia (2023–24)
Mar Caldas: Mujeres, trabajo, y memoria continues on the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Rúa Valle Inclán 2, Santiago de Compostela, Spain) by Might 25. The exhibition was curated by Monse Cea.
