The Cult of Beauty addresses one of these great universal themes. As Umberto Eco pointed out, beauty is an aspiration shared by all cultures, although it has never been an absolute or immutable category. Its relevance is especially significant today, when it continues to be a social construct profoundly influenced by the beauty industry, the attention economy, and social media. The exhibition stems from a cultural and political stance that doesn’t so much aim to define beauty as to analyze the mechanisms that sustain its cult.

The show is, in fact, an adaptation of the exhibition of the same name presented at the Wellcome Collection in London in 2023. The original curator, Janice Li, has been joined by researchers blanca arias and Júlia Llull, whose contributions expand the initial narrative and incorporate more pluralistic, critical perspectives, open to dissent.

The exhibition begins deliberately chronologically, guiding the visitor through classical ideals of beauty, based on principles of proportion, gender, and virtue. However, this seemingly stable narrative is interrupted by artworks that introduce fissures and raise questions. The works of Lorenza Böttner and Carlos Motta, among others, problematize these normative models and demonstrate the extent to which beauty has historically functioned as a device for inclusion and exclusion.

As the exhibition progresses, dichotomies such as beautiful/ugly or virtue/failure begin to crumble, although others continue to operate strongly, especially the association between beauty and youth. Forms of exclusion persist, albeit in new configurations. From colonial exoticism, capable of objectifying any form of otherness, we move to contemporary mechanisms of invisibility linked to race, gender, or identity. In response, trans, queer, and non-binary collectives have developed strategies of self-expression, resistance, and the construction of collective memory. In this context, Colita’s portraits dedicated to the Roma community, Angélica Dass’s Humanae project, with its wide spectrum of skin tones, and Norma Pérez’s trans portraits engage particularly effectively with the exhibition’s themes.

The exhibition then delves into the complex relationship between beauty, medicine, and science. From the cosmetic practices of ancient Egypt to the anatomical ideals of the Renaissance, the journey leads to the present, where the obsession with image—an extreme result of the society of the spectacle—is amplified by the commercialization of pharmaceuticals, aesthetic treatments, and surgical procedures. The new standards are no longer necessarily associated with proportion or virtue, but increasingly with purchasing power. Beauty thus appears as a privilege that can be bought, with consequences that affect both physical health and emotional well-being. How can we identify these forms of control in order to conquer greater spaces of autonomy? Where does individual desire end and collective pressure begin? The works of Marina Vargas and Arvida Byström point precisely to this overflowing of normative limits, making visible the restrictions that underlie any standard.

The installation Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, by Xcessive Aesthetics, places the visitor before a distorting mirror that reflects the visual pollution that accompanies our daily experience. An incessant flow of images, filters, algorithms, and aspirational models that we consume through social media, from which it is increasingly difficult to escape, raises numerous questions: Who establishes the standards of beauty today: cultural institutions, the beauty industry, algorithms, or social media? How do filters, artificial intelligence, and digital editing affect our perception of ourselves? Can there be an aesthetic of difference that is not absorbed by the market? Are we witnessing a democratization of beauty or a sophistication of its control mechanisms? Is it possible to imagine a society less obsessed with appearance? What do we lose when we have we turned beauty into an obligation?

But The Cult of Beauty is not confined to the exhibition space. As is usual at the CCCB, the project is expanded through a robust public program featuring thinkers and specialists such as Eloy Fernández Porta, Remedios Zafra, and the curators themselves. In addition, there is an educational program for LGBTQ+ youth, coordinated by Cordova and developed in collaboration with artists like ¥E$Si PERSE and Toni Hervás, as well as the film series Beautiful and Eternal, curated by Desirée de Fez for Las Gandules 2026. The selection of fantasy and science fiction films addresses issues such as youth, aesthetic pressure, and the obsession with preserving beauty, extending many of the questions raised by the exhibition onto the screen.

Rather than offering definitive answers, The Cult of Beauty invites us to critically reconsider an idea we often take for granted. Because, if beauty has never been a neutral category, perhaps the real challenge lies in asking ourselves who defines it, who benefits from it, and who inevitably falls outside its boundaries.

The exhibition The Cult of Beauty, curated by Janice Li, blanca arias, and Júlia Llull, along with its accompanying public program, can be visited and followed at the CCCB until November 8, 2026.

[Artícle published in A*DESK 5-8-2026]

La entrada Beauty in dispute se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

The CoNCA Annual Report is a public document that analyses the state of culture and the arts in Catalonia, reviewing the main trends, data and cultural policies of the previous year. It also evaluates the action of public administrations in cultural matters and identifies structural challenges in the sector. Finally, it proposes strategic recommendations to strengthen the Catalan cultural ecosystem and guide future policies.

La entrada Visual Arts. Collaborations and training in times of precariousness and museum expansion 2025 se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

The main objective is to propose indicative salary scales that promote the dignity of cultural work and that the centers commit to applying.

The proposal is an initiative of the General Directorate of Cultural Rights, Creation and Libraries of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat of Catalonia and has been developed jointly by representatives of centers of the Public System of Visual Arts Facilities (SPEAV) , and the professional associations PAAC (Platforma Assembléària d’Artistes de Catalunya) and ACCA (Association Catalana de Crítica d’Art). Montse Badia has carried out the reporting of this document.

La entrada Salary scales se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

Culture and Rights for Democratic Health

MACBA Convent Auditorium – June 30, 2026.

This event is structured around two interconnected themes.

The first explores the relationship between the visual arts and individual, social, and community health.

The second addresses cultural rights as inalienable rights for everyone.

Both dimensions converge on a shared conviction: culture acts as an active force against distress, individualistic withdrawal, and the rise of regressive trends.

Organized by: Directorate General for Cultural Rights, Creation, and Libraries, Department of Culture, Government of Catalonia.

Welcome and introduction by Xavier Fina, Director General for Cultural Rights, Creation, and Libraries.

Conversations:

• Art as an active force in medical and care settings. Conversation between Sergi Blancafort and Montserrat Verdú, with Pilar Cruz.

• Art and health through artistic practices. Conversation facilitated by José Antonio Delgado with Gemma Paris and Felipe G.

• Art as an active force for community health. Conversation between Javier Rodrigo and Quim Packard.

• Art for democratic health. Conversation facilitated by Amanda Cuesta with Mar Sureda and Nerea Campo.

• Economic health in artistic practices. Presentation on professional remuneration scales with Montse Badia and Ester Martínez.

Institutional closing remarks by the Hon. Sònia Hernández Almodóvar, Minister of Culture of the Government of Catalonia.

Photos Xavier Menal

La entrada Active Principles: Culture and Rights for Democratic Health se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

Interview with Carmen Corbera for the podcast El Mundo del Arte.

March 2026.

La entrada Podcast El Mundo del Arte: The curatorial rol and art criticism with Montse Badia se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

This figure, heir to the legacy of Harald Szeemann and projects such as When Attitudes Become Form (1969), placed the emphasis not only on artistic concepts and processes, but above all on complicity with artists and critical dialogue with the institution. Without being part of the institutional organization chart, the independent curator played a mediating role between artists, institutions and audiences, generating spaces of productive tension.

Today the scenario is very different. Independent professionals (artists, curators, curators or mediators) become small one-person businesses that must simultaneously assume management, communication, dissemination and production, in addition to conceptual and research work. This multiplicity of roles responds less to a choice than to a structural precariousness of the sector. At the same time, contemporary art competes for attention in societies saturated with stimuli, where the visual impacts of social networks and the entertainment industry often displace the slow temporality of research and critical thinking. Although to what extent Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl can be as or more political than full museum programs talking about decolonization is another matter. Economic resources exist, but they are distributed unevenly: they are abundant for major museum expansions or emblematic institutions, while they arrive in trickles to the independent cultural fabric, often in the form of subsidies that generate budgetary uncertainty until well into the middle of the year.

In his article, Miralda also points out the consolidation of a model in which the artistic direction of major biennials falls to those responsible for large institutions, favoring the repeated circulation of artists and discourses and producing a homogenization that limits plurality.

However, consolidated institutions share with independent initiatives the desire to think about the present, preserve heritage and imagine fairer futures, although this aspiration is often strained by their own structures. The solution would not be so much to oppose the institution, but to activate numerous instituting practices between art and politics that allow the implementation of multiple institutional forms that can be complementary and truly transformative.

[Text published in Bonart magazine number 203, March 2026]

La entrada Precariousness and homogenization. Contradictions of the curatorial present se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

Welcome to The Kitchen Network!
The Fourth episode takes place in Barcelona!

Unfolding as an episode in the last reality TV food competition on earth, this performance uses humour to examine the divide between online food cultures and their disconnection to wider issues of class, gender and geography. 

In this episode we step into a future where the European Union has dissolved, climate policy has failed, and old trade agreements have fractured. The promises of the European Green Deal remain unfinished across a continent marked by material scarcity, even as digital culture continues to project images of abundance.

Across Spain, farmland competes with data centers built to sustain cloud computing and AI. Water is diverted between crops and cooling systems; rural regions strain, cities expand, and digital infrastructure reshapes the landscape. In the absence of coordinated governance, spectacle becomes policy.

Food distribution is now governed by the Eurovision Exchange Agreement (EEA): each year, the country that wins Eurovision gains temporary authority over continental food allocation. Spain, the most recent winner, occupies a precarious position of relative abundance within an unequal and unstable Europe.

Water is tightly controlled, commodified, and unevenly distributed. This episode is sponsored by Blue Reserve, a premium hydration brand. Each contestant receives just two bottles to last the competition, as the AI host reminds viewers: “Because Not Everyone Gets a Second Pour.”

With elderly residents from the surrounding neighborhood serving as judges, The Kitchen Network stages cooking as performance in a time of scarcity, reflecting on inequality, digital expansion, and the politics of food in a fragmented Europe.

About the The Kitchen Network & Luiza Prado

The Kitchen Network is a theatrical performance that continues Luiza Prado’s ongoing investigation of the necropolitical infrastructures around reproduction, nourishment, and planetary collapse.

The event taking place at Antic Teatre in Barcelona on March 24, 2026 corresponds to the fourth episode of the series, which continues and completes the research developed by the artist while adapting to each specific context. The first episode, presented within the framework of Transmediale in Berlin (January 2024), emphasized the technological aspects of the project. The second, held in Nottingham (April 2024), focused on the kitchens of migrant communities. The third, presented at the restaurant of the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin (October 2024), addressed labor and movement through the universe of the sandwich—a food associated with work rhythms and whose culinary origins point to non-native traditions.

In The Network Kitchen. Episode 4
Concept and direction: Luiza Prado
Master of Ceremonies: Albert Sánchez
Cook # 1: Monica Escudero
Cook # 2: Agnes Essonti Luque
Cook # 3: Irene Arcas
Jury: Old ladies from the community of the Antic Teatre

The Kitchen Network. Episode 4  is a produced by A*DESK.

La entrada A*LIVE 2026: The Kitchen Network. Episode 4 by Luiza Prado se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

In various projects he has addressed the opacity of a state body, the Civil Guard, understood as an operational system of police control (Fuerzas y cuerpos [Forces and bodies], 2016-2018); the exploitation of the natural environment and the forms of regulation exercised by large oligopolies (Energía sumergida [Submerged energy], 2018-2024; El caudal del río [The flow of the river], 2021-2025); or the VIP space in a sporting context as a place of agreements with great political and economic impact (Palco de honor [Honorary box], 2025), to mention only a few.

Firma, [Sign,] (2017-2019) is not her most recent work, although the passage of time has added new layers of meaning. Begun as a final year project under the supervision of Tanit Plana and Marta Dahó, Firma, marks a turning point in Artés’s work by giving central weight to research as a constitutive part of the piece. Firma, is structured around a series of direct and profoundly political questions: What does the State know about us? How much personal information does it manage? From where does it exercise control? What use does it make of this data? These questions serve as catalysts to sharpen our position as critical citizens.

The exhibition, titled Firma, focuses on official spaces that collect and manage our data—medical centers, civil registries, funeral homes, libraries, post offices—which the artist photographs using a large-format camera and an analog process. The images depict anonymous, prototypical, and perfectly interchangeable places, devoid of any trace of human presence. The carefully chosen framing evokes dead ends: spaces without exits, corridors without vanishing points, permeated by a Kafkaesque atmosphere. These are images that reflect the bureaucratic aspects of our lives, now indistinguishable from the vital ones.

In parallel, Artés compiles a large number of documents from these same spaces, forms requesting personal information that repeatedly culminate in the same imperative verb: “sign.” Sometimes accompanied by a comma intended to soften the command, other times followed by a colon, but always stated as a mandate. A seemingly banal gesture that condenses the transfer of rights, data, and responsibilities into a single act.

Photographs and documents thus create a portrait of the state’s administrative structure as a contemporary panopticon. Bentham’s prison design (a central tower from which inmates are watched without their knowledge) and its reformulation by Michel Foucault, as a technology of power extendable to the whole of society, acquire new significance in the context of accelerated digitalization, especially since the 2020 pandemic.

The artist’s book(1) that is part of the project includes a revealing conversation between Paula Artés and Gemma Galdón Clavell, PhD in security and technology policy and public policy analyst. It reflects on how the modern state is founded on data management as a form of organization and control, and how bureaucracy plays a key role in its historical constitution.

With digitalization, this capacity for control increases exponentially. The data we voluntarily provide is intertwined with that collected involuntarily, generated by our daily activities, from the purchases we make to the routes we take, the services we use, and the platforms we consult. We are more monitored, but less aware of it, and paradoxically, we have less control over our own data.

The technofeudalism (2) described by Yanis Varoufakis is no longer a theoretical abstraction but a palpable reality. The primary purpose of digital data infrastructures is not to make our lives easier or expand our rights, but rather to maximize the profitability of large global technology corporations.

The spaces photographed by Paula Artés still exist, although their functions have been radically transformed. It is no longer necessary to physically travel to complete a transaction: one or a few clicks are all it takes. Data then ascends to what we call “the cloud,” a poetic and seemingly innocuous term that masks the proliferation of physical data centers, which are highly resource-intensive, especially in terms of water and electricity, with an increasingly evident ecological and geopolitical impact.

The disappearance of physical space does not imply the disappearance of control, but rather its intensification. Power no longer needs monumental architecture or a visible presence; it operates in a distributed, opaque, and automated manner. Bureaucracy, far from diminishing, becomes more efficient, faster, and more difficult to challenge. The act of signing, now transformed into accepting, checking a box, or swiping a finger, occurs more frequently and with less awareness of its consequences. This signature places us before a central paradox of contemporary democracies: the more streamlined administrative systems become, the less room there is for dissent. Consent becomes a formality, and responsibility shifts to the individual, while the infrastructures of power remain outside our field of vision. Invisibility thus becomes a fundamental political strategy. What is not seen is not questioned, and what is not questioned becomes normalized.

In this sense, Paula Artés’s project traces a critical cartography of the present, in which control is not imposed by force, but rather managed through protocols, interfaces, and administrative languages ​​that we have learned to accept as inevitable.

Understanding these mechanisms, making them visible, and naming them is a profoundly political act. It does not guarantee emancipation, but it is an indispensable condition for imagining it. Because only that which is understood can be questioned, and only that which is questioned can, eventually, be transformed.

(1) Artés, Paula, Firma. Cuaderno de la Kursala, nº 90. Universidad de Cádiz, 2025.
(2) In Varoufakis, Yannis’ Technofeudalism: What killed Capitalism (Bodley Head, 2023), the author identifies the owners of what he calls “cloud capital” as new feudal lords, turning us into serfs. The consequence is increased inequality.

[This text accompanies the exhibition Firma, by Paula Artés at the Centre Cultural Melchor Zapata, Benicássim. 19 February – 26 April 2026]

La entrada Obedience protocols. The State of Data in “Firma,” by Paula Artés se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

La entrada Laboral Conditions in the Arts (symposium) se publicó primero en Montse Badia.

A documentary about Espai 10 / Espai 13 at the Miró Foundation, Barcelona

La entrada El risc radical se publicó primero en Montse Badia.