“It’s difficult to speak of La Movida and explain it to those who didn’t live those years. We weren’t a generation; we weren’t an artistic movement; we weren’t a group with a concrete ideology. We were simply a bunch of people that coincided in one of the most explosive moments in the country.” – Pedro Almodóvar
This pioneering contemporary visual art group exhibition takes the artistic and socio-cultural movement La Movida (literally “the movement”) of post-Franco Spain as its thematic heart. Suddenly the forbidden arenas of politics and sexuality are open season for public debate and creative communities. Excess, clubbing, drugs, artistic freedom, gay rights, pornography and more all collided in an outpouring of freedom from suppression and a desire for making up on lost time in the early 80s in Madrid.
The exhibition sets new commissions reacting to the movement alongside existing international works that explore major conceits of La Movida less directly including freedom and excess, hedonism and transgression. Forty years since the transition to democracy, the exhibition and its related films, performance and literature present a re-imaging of a movement with a strong contemporary artistic and socio-political resonance today.
New accompanying publication – Dark Habits
Nineteen contributors explore freedom and indulgence, hedonism, transgression, sex and moral conventions through short stories, poetry, essay, experimental writing and flash-fiction in this new publication.
Featuring contributions by Oreet Ashery, Shumon Basar, Marissa Burgess, Luis López Carrasco, Mercedes Cebrián, Chantal Faust, La JohnJoseph, Jonathan Kemp, Anne Louise Kershaw, Omar Kholeif, Patricia MacCormack, Adam O’Riordan, Sarah Perks, Heather Phillipson, Natasha Stallard, Esther Teichmann, Greg Thorpe, Jason Wood & James King.
