Ain’t that just like me?

Madrid, Spain

What if the crisis isn’t only outside us — but already living inside the way we look, remember, love, and belong

video

Image credit

Elina Brotherus. Passing Music for a Tree, ‘’Règle du Jeu’’ series, 2018. 4K video, stereo sound. 2’ 15’’. Edition: 6.

Meet the artist

Group Exhibition: Roger Ballen, Elina Brotherus, Julia Fullerton-Batten, Ellen Kooi, Cristobal Ascencio, Emma Á. Marty, YunPing Li, and Ignacio Navas.

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Performance Art Movement, Photo, Video Art Movement

ArtLovers Tip

As you move through the exhibition, ask yourself: What part of this feels uncomfortably familiar? The power of Ain’t that just like me? is that it turns contemporary crisis into intimate recognition — not something happening far away, but something already shaping how we see ourselves.

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

Contemporary photography expanded through performance, photogrammetry, video, staged image, visual narrative, and digital/physical experimentation.

Ain’t that just like me? is a group exhibition that asks how we respond to a troubled present with awareness, sensitivity, and responsibility. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of “response-ability”, the show explores how personal and collective conflicts become part of us — and how artists turn that internal tension into images.

The exhibition brings together photography-based practices that move beyond the single image, exploring how bodies, landscapes, identities, and relationships are transformed by contemporary tensions.

The exhibition moves through:

  • Trauma and contemporary anxiety
  • Bodies and landscapes transformed by crisis
  • Family bonds in tension
  • Transitory identities
  • The impossibility of motherhood
  • Gentrification, isolation, and environmental degradation
  • The fragile relationship between physical and digital realities

Worth the trip

if you’re interested in photography as a tool for emotional and social reflection.

Because this exhibition is not only about documenting the world. It is about asking how we are implicated in it. The title becomes a moment of recognition: the problem stops being external and becomes personal — something we carry, repeat, resist, or transform.

It also matters because the show creates an intergenerational dialogue between established and emerging artists, connecting two spaces — Cámara Oscura and El Local — to rethink the future of contemporary photography.

How to experience it

Don’t read the exhibition as one single story — move through it as a constellation of responses

Pay attention to how photography touches other media: performance, video, digital processes, staging

Ask what each image is responding to: trauma, environment, body, family, identity, place

Notice the emotional shift when a social problem becomes intimate

Visit both venues if possible — the dialogue between spaces is part of the project

Madrid, Spain

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