Claudia Pagès Rabal

Claudia Pagès Rabal is a visual artist, performer, and writer. With the means of language, movement and music, their own body and other choreographed bodies, the artist explores topics such as social hierarchies, a sense of belonging, queer body economies, and desire. At mumok, Claudia Pagès Rabal will present a new commissioned work in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery in London. Continuing their research into the Iberian Peninsula during the al-Andalus era—the Arabic name for lands under Muslim rule between 711 and 1492—Pagès focuses on fortifications of inner Catalonia. Five defense towers erected at the heart of the political-military buffer zone in the so-called Hispanic March are the starting point for a video of choreographed dance, light, and sound sequences in which the artist conjures questions about national identity, the construction of political systems, and the legends attached to them. “I am not so much interested in the castles themselves,” says Pagès, “rather the kind of non-place that separated rural and militarized European feudalism from an urban, culturally and technically advanced Andalusian society.” The Pagès Rabal’s work encompasses different forms of self-defense and maps out how colonial practices of erasure have persisted over time.

Produced within the Call of „la Caixa“ Foundation Support for Creation'24. Production.

Claudia Pagès Rabal (b. 1990, Barcelona) lives and works in Barcelona. Selected exhibitions include: Manifesta 15, Barcelona, 2024; Scene I. Making landscape, IVAM, Valencia, 2024; Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe, Sculpture Center, New York, 2023; Uno, CA2M, Madrid, 2023; Banditry, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2023; Gerundi Circular, Tabakalera, Donostia, 2022; Some of It Falls from the Belt and Lands on the Walkway Beside the Conveyor, Vleeshal, Middelburg, 2022; Panorama MACBA, Barcelona, 2022; Rats and Roaches, CAPC, Bordeaux, 2022; The Living House, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, 2021; March Meetings, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE, 2018. She published her hair in 2020 with Onomatopee, her first novel Més de dues aigües in 2024 with Empúries Narrativa, and will launch a new book with Wendy’s Subway in 2025. Pagès Rabal was awarded the Ojo Crítico Visual Arts Award in 2022, and has been artist in residence at Gasworks, London, 2017 and Triangle France, Marseille, 2020.

Opening: December 3, 2025, 7 pm