Fixations per Minute

Fixations per Minute, Espai 13 exhibition program 2023-2024 at Fundació Joan Miró

The curators of the series, Yaby (Beatriz Ortega Botas and Alberto Vallejo) and the head of exhibitions at Fundació Joan Miró, Martina Millà, have presented the Espai 13 exhibition program for the 2023-2024 season, in collaboration with the Banco Sabadell Foundation. The project examines the concept of reading and its relation to current artistic practices through the work of a selection of artists from the local and international scene.

Reading has a longstanding relationship with contemporary art, for which it is a constant wellspring of both poetic and discourse-based inspiration. Recent art employs various visual strategies to address reading from a more critical perspective, suspecting the book as a mere source of pleasure and knowledge, singling it out as a complex device of subjectivisation that commits violence that is not always evident. In this thought context, reading is revealed to be a process endowed with power, a process that includes the construction of the narratives, hierarchies and exclusions that exceed the text, determining the existence of certain bodies and the way they are read.

The title of the project is a reference to the formula used to calculate reading speed. Each fixation is the moment the eyes fixate on a word: the lower the number of fixations per minute, the higher the speed at which you process text. These fixations are the intimate and physiological points of contact through which a text enters the body. The term also points to other characteristics of language that are relevant in this series, such as its ability to fix meanings and impose itself, just as an obsession does.

The exhibitions by Claudia Pagès, P. Staff, Jota Mombaça and Iki Yos Piña Narváez Funes, and Kandis Williams use diverse visual media to complicate some of the technical and rhetorical mechanisms of reading by exposing their political consequences.