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SAVE THE DATE: 25 February 2025, opening of “Laia Estruch. HELLO EVERYONE” at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

Wed, Feb 5 2025

Laia Estruch performing “Crol (Moll)” (2019) at the Pisicines Municipals de Montjuïc, part of her solo exhibition “Laia Estruch: Crol”, Espai13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, Madrid. Photo: Anna Fàbrega.

SAVE THE DATE

“Laia Estruch. HELLO EVERYONE”
26 February–1 September 2025
Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid

Opening: 25 February 2025, 8pm
Curated by Latitudes

Latitudes is thrilled to announce the opening of “HELLO EVERYONE”, a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Catalan artist Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981).

Over the last fifteen years, Estruch has produced a consistently personal body of work that treats the human voice as a material reality—an expressive force and a medium expelled from the body. Her work has spanned ancestral poetry and post-punk music but has increasingly moved beyond the performance of spoken or sung words, and towards a sonic language that explores raw communicative effects, body consciousness and non-human agency. The articulation of noises and meanings often encompasses and exceeds human vocal language: breathing, exclamation, mumbling, ululation, cries and whispers. This process has evolved in tandem with creating often monumental sculptural settings for each of her vocal projects, resulting in steel slides, inflatable buoys or giant net traps, for example. These have become surrogate bodies in themselves, as well as temporary dramatic stages and interpretive scores for creating scenes and routines that the artist has termed vocal “rehearsals”.

“HELLO EVERYONE” takes the form of a fragmentary and vociferous archive spanning live events, sculpture, audio installation, moving images, graphic works and visual scores. This ambitious exhibition acts as a living-and-breathing storage that reconfigures a body of work, as well as works-as-bodies and spans the breadth of Estruch’s artistic research to date while engaging with her history as a performer. Forming a fluid relationship between active and inactive modes of presentation, and questioning the conventions of displaying and performing artworks, “HELLO EVERYONE” explores the sense and sincerity of verbal expression and the agency of the female voice.

Laia Estruch performing “GANIVET” (2020) at the Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, Madrid. Photo: Daniel Cao.

A publication accompanying the exhibition will offer the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to the artist’s work. Designed by her longtime collaborator Ariadna Serrahima (Oficina del Disseny) and published by the Museo Reina Sofía, it will include a new text by artist Sharon Hayes (Estruch’s former professor at The Cooper Union) reflecting on performance pedagogy; the essay “Voice-Body-Sculpture” by Latitudes, the exhibition curators, which offers the first in-depth overview of Estruch’s practice; and a conversation between the artist and Marc Navarro, who curated Estruch’s 2019 exhibition at Espai 13, Fundació Miró. The monograph will be available in Spring 2025 in Spanish and English editions.

“HELLO EVERYONE” will take place on the fourth floor of the museum’s Sabatini building, and run concurrently with exhibitions dedicated to Huguette Caland (19 February-25 August 2025) and Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa (28 May-20 October 2025), amongst others. It will also coincide with several events programmed in Madrid around the 44th edition of ARCOmadrid art fair (5–9 March 2025).

Laia Estruch performing “TRENA” (2023) at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), Barcelona. Courtesy of the artist and Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, Madrid. Photo: Anna Fàbrega.

ABOUT LAIA ESTRUCH

Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981) has had solo exhibitions at the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona (2023); Spiritvessel, Espinavessa (2022); Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona (2020); Capella de Sant Roc, Valls (2019); and at Espai 13, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2019).

Recent group exhibitions include “After Paradise”, Kortrijk Triennial, Belgium (2024); “Topalekuak”, Tabakalera, Donostia (2024); Patio by ZONAMACO, ABC Art Baja, San José del Cabo, Mexico (2024); “I drank words submerged in dreams”, 23 Bienal de Arte Paiz, Guatemala (2023); “After the Mediterranean”, Hauser & Wirth, Menorca (2023); “Panorama 21. Notes for an Eye Fire”, MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2021) and “La cuestión es ir tirando”, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City (2020).

Estruch has performed in numerous public events within the framework of exhibitions, biennials and festivals, including “Segar i cantar”, Lo Pati, Amposta (2024); “The Listening Affect”, Galeria da Biodiversidade, Porto (2023); “Passat / Present”, Centre d’Interpretació d’Art Rupestre de la Roca dels Moros del Cogul, Lleida (2022); 10th Deleste Festival, Bombas Gens, Valencia (2022); “The Journeying Stream”, TBA21, Sotos de la Albolafia, Córdoba (2022), Bianyal 2021, Vall de Bianya (2021) or “Plataforma. Festival de Artes Performativas”, Parque de Bonaval, Santiago de Compostela (2021), amongst other.

In 2022 Estruch won the 6th Premio Cervezas Alhambra de Arte Emergente (Alhambra Beer Award for Emerging Art) with the work “Zócalo”, and was awarded the 2021 Premi Ciutat de Barcelona (City of Barcelona Prize) in the category of Visual Arts.

Works in public space include “Moat-2 / Playground Scene” (2017–18) at Fabra i Coats Fàbrica de Creació, Barcelona; and the recently completed Concomitentes public commission “Aguas Vivas”, at Llanos de Penagos, Cantabria (2024).

Estruch has a BA in Fine Arts from the Universitat de Barcelona (2010) and studied Performance Art and Sound Art at The Cooper Union, New York (2010). She regularly lectures at the Facultat de Belles Arts, Universitat de Barcelona.

Her work is represented by Galería Ehrhardt Flórez, Madrid.

ABOUT THE CURATORS

In 2005, Max Andrews (1975 Bath) and Mariana Cánepa Luna (1977 Montevideo) founded Latitudes, a curatorial office based in Barcelona that works internationally across contemporary art practices.

Latitudes has curated exhibitions including the inaugural Panorama triennial “Notes for an Eye Fire” (with Hiuwai Chu, 2021) and “José Antonio Hernández-Diez: I Will Fear no Evil” (2016) at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona; “Things Things Say” (2020) and “Joan Morey. COL·LAPSE” (2018) at Fabra i Coats: Centre d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona; “4,543 billion. The Matter of Matter” (2017) at CAPC Musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux; “Compositions” for the first two Barcelona Gallery Weekend (2015 and 2016), among others. Latitudes was the Lead Faculty of the curatorial residency “Geologic Time” at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada (2017) and was part of the jury and mentoring team of three seasons of Barcelona Producció at the Centre d'Art La Capella (2016-2020).

Between 2016 and 2022, Latitudes edited the online project “Incidents (of Travel)” produced by KADIST, narrating twenty encounters between an artist and a curator from around the world. Other editorial projects include the edition of the first monograph dedicated to the artist “Lara Almarcegui: Projects 1995-2010” (Archive Books, 2011), live-editing ten weekly tabloids throughout the exhibition “The Last Newspaper” (New Museum, New York, 2010), guest editing a 500-page ‘green’ issue “Ecology, Luxury and Degradation” (UOVO magazine, 2007); and the anthology "LAND, ART: A Cultural Ecology Handbook" (Royal Society of Arts/Arts Council England, 2006).

Max Andrews is Contributing Editor of Frieze magazine where he has written since 2004 and has collaborated with Artforum since 2024. Mariana Cánepa Luna was secretary of the board of Hangar Centre of Production and Artistic Research, Barcelona (2015–2019) and Advisor of the Acquisitions Committee for the National Collection of Contemporary Art, Government of Catalonia (2024). They are members of the Asociació Catalana de Crítica d'Art (ACCA/AICA) and Active Members of the Gallery Climate Coalition.

Latitudes has curated the exhibition “Jorge Satorre. Ria” currently on view at the Museo Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles (Madrid) until August 31, 2025.

https://www.lttds.org

→ RELATED CONTENT:

Laia Estruch’s “Ocells Perduts” (2021) in the exhibition “Panorama 21: Apunts per a un incendi dels ulls” and four open rehearsals, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), October 2021–February 2022.
Laia Estruch performs “Mix” (2021–ongoing” at PUBLICS, Helsinki, March 2022.
Cover Story, April 2022: Mix & Match: Laia Estruch at PUBLICS, 1 Apr 2022
Panorama in Madrid and Córdoba, 14 June 2022
Laia Estruch performs “Ocells Perduts V67” (2022) on the river banks of the Guadalquivir River in the city of Córdoba, as part of “Pasaje del agua | The Journeying Stream”, a programme jointly convened by TBA21 and TBA21–Academy.
Cuerpos de voz conversation between Laia Estruch and TBA21 Chief Curator Soledad Gutiérrez.
Podcast, “‘Minor’ Ornithologies” conducted by Max Andrews of Latitudes for TBA21 on st_age, 27 September 2022

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