Curators: Conrado Uribe and Miguel Leal Rios
A LOOP Barcelona and Leal Rios Foundation project in partnership with La Virreina Image Centre

La Virreina Image Centre will be taking part in the latest edition of LOOP Barcelona Festival with the exhibition Writing Diffraction - Works from the Leal Rios Foundation Contemporary Art Collection.

The 13th edition of LOOP Barcelona, comprising LOOP Fair, Festival and Studies, will focus on two crossover areas: What about Collecting Video Art? and Beyond the Image: Sound.

The Lisbon-based Fundação Leal Rios will put on a group exhibition at La Virreina Image Centre featuring works from its contemporary art collection in keeping with LOOP 2015’s focus on video collections and sound art linked to moving images.

Addressing the relationship between sound and the moving image in the context of LOOP is crucial; sound directly affects the way a particular work is perceived and lived by the viewer (experience). This Leal Rios Foundation project also explores possible points of intersection between light and sound. As elements, both are realised and propagated as wave motions, in whose encounter and relationship with other objects in space the phenomenon of diffraction occurs. Ultimately they share characteristics such as being one of the (apparently intangible) primary sensory experiences, requiring a means of transport and possessing an imprecise nature (between particles and waves), while depending on the intensity of vibration they may even convey a sense of solidity.

The pieces selected provide different ways to understand, record, name and even measure experiences of being in the world, becoming devices which use elements such as sound and light (natural and artificial) to phenomenologically and philosophically interpret the universe and existence itself. The works thus operate as information transducers in which life experiences such as language, the passage of time, the body, memory, landscape and notions of nature and the relationship with death are addressed.

Sophie Whettnall (Brussels, 1973) presents Recording the Light, a record of the entry of sunlight through a window of a building. This intervention was carried out in Barcelona in 2001 and shows the artist drawing the squares of light and shadow created by the architecture of the space. As the day progresses, the light shifts and a superposition of multiple outlines on the floor and wall can be observed, thus fixing a translational movement as an in-situ sculptural installation.

Francisco Tropa (Lisbon, 1968) presents Demonstration of Diffraction Using Water Waves, one of his sophisticated sculptural projects in materials such as wood, metal, glass, rubber and mirrors. Tropa works at the intersection between the discourses of science, philosophy and art. His sculptural projects refer to machines designed to perform existential experiments through the use of basic mechanisms and elements such as water and light.

André Romão (Lisbon, 1984) presents the video Looking (prospection / exchange / profit). It features the image of an eye blinking repeatedly and indefinitely on a loop. The eye-monitor is presented in such a degree of artificiality / otherness / immateriality that it separates it from its biological function. This video is proposed in the context of this exhibition as an element that produces a break with the other works; an eye that is apparently an inanimate object, a non-representation of the sense of vision, a reversal of the process of representation.

The Brazilian artists Angela Detanico (Caxias do Sul, 1974) and Rafael Lain (Caxias do Sul, 1973), better known as Detanico Lain, present two installations, Onda and Windspelling (odyssey winds). In them, the artists continue their interdisciplinary investigation into the impossibility of naming reality; language seems to take over in their works, since they are built on the unintentional misuse of encoding and decoding work that characterises the flow of information between the individuals making up contemporary global societies.