Past and present, memory and its construction

The exhibition of Ana Teresa Ortega, winner of the 2020 National Photography Award, covers her works from the 1990s to the present, some of them unpublished to date. In the words of the artist, born in Alicante in 1952, "this is the first time you can see this selection of projects creating synergies and relationships between them, dialoguing in an exhibition context". 

Curator: Pep Benlloch

The exhibition, co-produced with the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana and curated by Pep Benlloch, is the result of the public call of the Consorci de Museus Trajectòries, which aims to review the career of artists and collectives of the Valencian Community, highlighting the work of creators like Ana Teresa Ortega and their contributions to Spanish contemporary art. In it, the author invites reflection on issues such as the construction of individual and collective memory, exile, identity and literature as a guardian of memory.

With a chronological approach, the exhibition provides an in-depth look at this diverse and committed photographic work. The exhibition also includes a series of projects that cover the Second Republic, the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship. "As apprentices of history, we see many gaps and voids to fill. In these projects there has been an attempt to fill them, question them, make them visible and learn from them." Thus, Ortega travels in these works through prisons set up in the postwar period, public works born of forced labor and scenarios of scientific exile.

Download the room sheet

		Ana Teresa Ortega Aznar was born in Alicante in 1952. She began her photographic production in the 90s. She is a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Valencia and co-director of the Master in Photography, Art and Technique at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Her work has as a central element the fragility of historical memory. Her work reflects on the media as a territory of domination and its effect on a society that has forgotten how to think historically, the theme of exile as an allegorical evocation of various forms of oblivion and exclusion as well as the dissolution of the memory of history that from different discursive strategies affects how our culture has been built and is built largely on the forgetfulness, on the intentional forgetting. These themes will be dealt with repeatedly and constitute the cornerstone of his work.
		Catalog co-published with the Generalitat Valenciana Produced in co-publication with the Generalitat Valenciana, the volume gathers Ana Teresa Ortega's production from the 1990s to the present. The project takes as a starting point the exhibition Vision-revision of 1990 and as a closing point her latest projects, carried out in the last decade.
		Exhibition co-produced with: