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.Their video installations often draw from fields of knowledge outside of art, like history, jurisprudence, or linguistics, creating links to pop culture and the collective choreographies in its wake. The continuity of certain systems and institutions in society is maintained in the present through what Pagès calls the “immobility of stable circulations” and “containment architectures,” which uphold power through specific flows of goods, capital, and value.

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 socalled 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 artist’s work encompasses different forms of self-defense and maps out how colonial practices of erasure have persisted over time. 

Curated by Franz Thalmair

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