Volver a imaginar

Madrid, Spain

Contemporary photography expanded into installation, photo-sculpture, archive, conceptual practice, material experimentation, and visual research.

Juan Couder. Clepsydra #54A, 2022

Image credit

Juan Couder. Clepsydra #54A, 2022 © Juan Couder

Meet the artist

Rob Hornstra, Aleix Plademunt, Txema Salvans, Anoek Steketee, Javier Arboledas, Jon Gorospe, Eduardo Nave, Juan Couder, Rafael Trapiello, Lurdes Basolí, Ira Lombardía, Arguiñe Escandón, Yann Gross

The Movement

Photo

ArtLovers Tip

Visit this show as an antidote to image fatigue. Instead of asking “What am I looking at?”, ask “How was this image made, moved, changed, or remembered?” The power of Volver a imaginar is that it teaches you to distrust the image — and then fall in love with it again.

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

Volver a imaginar explores the limits of the photographic image and asks how images are created, circulated, and consumed today.

Volver a imaginar brings together thirteen artists who rethink photography at a moment of transformation. Instead of treating photography only as a flat image, the exhibition turns it into object, language, archive, system, and experience.

You’re watching:

  • Images that question identity, territory, and structures of power
  • Installations and photo-sculptures that expand photography beyond the wall
  • Works exploring space, society, and image
  • Archives, memory, classification systems, and the trace of time
  • Photography shaped by chance, perception, materiality, and temporality
  • Historical documents reactivated to create new readings of the present

The result feels like an ecosystem of images — not a single story, but many ways of asking what photography can still become.

Worth the trip

Especially if you want to understand where photography is going now.

Because this is not a nostalgic photography show. It looks at photography after the image flood: after social media, archives, algorithms, repetition, and visual overload.

It matters because the exhibition brings together Spanish and Dutch perspectives within PHotoESPAÑA’s Guest Country section and expands from the PHotoESPAÑA PRO Talento a bordo program, connecting emerging and established contemporary practices.

This is photography asking for a second life: not only to document the world, but to question how the world is represented.

How to experience it

Don’t look for one central theme — move through it as a constellation

Pay attention to process: how each artist makes, transforms, or questions images

Notice when photography becomes object, installation, archive, or sculpture

Ask what each work does to the image: preserve it, break it, classify it, reactivate it, or make it unstable

Give yourself time — this exhibition rewards slow reading, not quick scrolling

Madrid, Spain

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