Cabello/Carceller
Cabello/Carceller is an artists team formed in 1992 by Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller (París, 1963 / Madrid, 1964). They live and work in Madrid (Spain), and currently teach at Cuenca Faculty of Fine Arts, UCLM University in Cuenca (Spain.
Starting their collaboration around the beginning of the nineties, Cabello/ Carceller have developed an interdisciplinary work that uses different media – installation, performance, video, writing, drawing – to examine the hegemonic means of representation in visual practices, suggesting critical alternatives to them. From a conceptual, politically engaged approach, they use strategies as appropriation or performance and fiction to question the modernist narratives that avoid minority politics while recurrently quoting them.
Searching to unveil these contradictions, they invite mainly amateur but sometimes also professional collaborators who are to be confronted with unfamiliar or twisted – what we could call queer – situations or texts. Isolated and out of context, these protagonists experience an imbalance created among them, the narration, and the narrative structures on which they rely, frequently contributing to activate or expand their established meaning.
Cabello/Carceller have been recently included in Art and Queer Culture, a major historical survey published by Phaidon Press and written by Catherine Lord and Richard Meyer. Their work is also featured in The Queer Art of Failure, written by Judith Halberstam and published by Duke University Press, as well as on the prologue to the Spanish edition of Female Masculinity (Masculinidad femenina) by the same author.
A selection of collective shows include: 56ª Venice Biennale, Spanish Pavillion (Italy), Global Feminisms, Brooklyn Museum, New York and Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA - Fiction and Reality, MMOMA, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow - BB4 Bucharest Biennale: On Producing Possibilities, Bucharest, Romania – Bienal Latinoamericana de Artes Visuales, Curitiba, Brasil – re.act feminism. A Performing Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, and other European venues - Nuevas Historias. A New View of Spanish Photography and Video, Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway / Kuntsi Museum of Modern Art, Vaasa, Finland / Kulturhuset, Stockholm, Sweden / Royal Library, Denmark – Genealogías Feministas, MUSAC, León (Spain) – The Screen Eye or The New Image, Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg – Cooling Out, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork, Ireland, En todas partes, CGAC, Santiago de Compostela (Spain) – Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, Centre Pompidou, Paris (France).
Selected solo shows: MicroPolíticas, MicroPoéticas, Sala La Patriótica/CCEBA Buenos Aires, Argentina - Off Escena; Si yo fuera..., Abierto X Obras, Matadero Madrid, Spain - Archivo: Drag Modelos, Joan Prats Gallery, Barcelona and CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain - Suite Rivolta, Elba Benítez Gallery, Madrid, Spain or A/O (Caso Céspedes) CAAC Sevilla, Spain - Rapear Filosofía: Foucault, Sontag, Butler, Mbembe. Galería Elba Benítez, Madrid, Spain.
