Mar Caldas: Women, work and memory

As part of its programme featuring mid-career artists, the CGAC is delighted to present an individual exhibition of the work of Mar Caldas (Vigo, 1964), a pioneer of feminist artistic practice in Galicia. Her work, which is fundamentally photographic, is constantly renewing its stance as a means of protest against the different obstacles which, by their very nature, threaten women’s lives.

On this occasion, she invites us on a tour of her recent work, in which women’s work and an indictment of its low esteem, past and present, play a central discursive role. Granddaughter of a trade unionist executed by firing squad and a widow plunged into poverty, daughter of a mother stripped of her job of a telephone operator for merely getting married, Caldas articulates a wide-ranging specific project titled Retrato de familia (Family Portrait), in which she reflects on her family story to denounce the violence suffered by society during the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. With photography taking centre stage, it displays a wide range of formalisations: photographic collage with fitting images, photographic series in large format of her own creation, the projected photographic image by way of an installation and as the basis of a filmic work… and even a photographic piece in the form of a ‘take-away card.’

Mar Caldas’ work is conceptually dense, the result of continuous and laborious investigation, yet synthetic from a formal perspective, and it always seeks to prioritise communication with the spectator. This investigation impinges on both the limits and history of photography as a medium—in its uses and formalisations inside and beyond the field of art—as well on as other areas, in accordance with the specific needs of each project.

Beyond the photographic medium, the artist's research into other fields such as contemporary history, modern art history, sociology or ethnography is evident in this proposal. In what we could call a poetic way, Caldas engages in an archaeological practice: finding and analysing artefacts generated by academic art and professional photography. In this way, through art, she reconstructs the context in which certain pieces of Galicia’s material culture were created, to reveal women’s presence buried in the historical register.