Adrià Julià will present his two exhibitions titled Hot Iron and Hot Iron Marginalia, which use a photographic family archive cataloguing 556 Romanesque churches, mostly in Catalonia and the south of France between the 1950s and 1990s, as a springboard. The titles come from the saying “to strike while the iron is hot,” which means to take advantage of an opportunity when conditions are favorable. Julià found the phrase “the iron is now hot” in a letter dating from 1917 in which Gustavus T. Kirby, from the American Art Association, talks about a commercial interest in acquiring Romanesque artworks. In Hot Iron and Hot Iron Marginalia the effects of the economic transactions involved in cultural imports and exports are cross-linked between seemingly unrelated events, such as: the sale of Catalan Romanesque paintings to American buyers in the early twentieth century and the introduction of American football in Barcelona almost a hundred years later, just as Montjuïc was being transformed into one of the city’s main sports venues for the Olympic Games. These configurations also intersect with areas of exploitation of land, of cultural heritage, of women’s bodies, and the role of photography and image production in the redefinition of culture through the imposition of tourism and sport.
Through installations, cinema, video, photography and publications Adrià Julià examines the means of representation and reception of events of personal and collective historical dimensions, and the ways in which they negotiate memory, resistance, displacement, and survival. Born in Barcelona, he lives and works in Los Angeles and Bergen, where he is a professor at the Academy of Art, University of Bergen, since 2016.
His most recent solo exhibitions have been at Tabakalera, San Sebastián; Miró Foundation, Barcelona; Project Art Center, Dublin; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; LAXART, Los Angeles; Artists Space, New York; Insa Art Space, Seoul. He has been in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Museu Reina Sofia, Madrid; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea; Lyon Bennial, Lyon; Generali Foundation, Vienna; 7th Mercusur Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brasil; Akademie der Künste, Berlin. He presented performances at 29th São Paulo Bienal and Galeria Soledad Lorenzo. Adrià Julià was a Guna S. Mundheim Visual Arts Fellow at American Academy in Berlin, he received the Botín Foundation fellowship and grants from California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, Art Matters, American Center Foundation, “La Caixa” Fellowship program, and in 2002 he was awarded the Altadis Prize.
Lecture is part of Exhibiting/IZK Theory Lecture Series and is organised in cooperation with Camera Austria.
