Miguel Benlloch. Conjugated body

Miguel Benlloch. El detective. CentroCentro. 2017
14.06 - 06.10.2019

Tuesday - Sunday, 10 am - 8 pm

Floor 1

Free entry

The common denominator of the aesthetic/political practice of Miguel Benlloch lies in his continuous opposition to regulations, from his early anti-Franco militancy and his active intervention in the counter-cultural agitation of Granada. In the 1980s, he took part in the opening of the Planta Baja, sensing that the incipient institutional political system was bent on forgetting the recent past and would not respond to the citizen's longing for freedom and cultural experimentation, and would instead gradually deploy a widespread “depoliticised frivolity”. At the end of that decade, he became the co-founder of the cultural production company BNV Producciones, which was set up to promote projects, exhibitions and seminars, and to foster a dialogue between the arts and the social space.

His work is an example of a creation that is forged in the heat of the collective, and of the vitality of the social-political and artistic groups with which he interacted. His poems and texts, his performance art pieces, collages, photographs and large-scale digital images, illuminate practices that place the body at the centre of artistic discourses. During the last four decades, the activism, performance art pieces and work of Miguel Benlloch, embodied in a diverse, diffuse, migratory, illegal, playful, de-identified, improper or conjugated body, have disseminated and extended discourses that shatter the binary and debunk the heterocentric categories imposed by the dominant cultural codes. In this way, they have contributed to the erosion of historical constructions and fixed and watertight identities based on dual behaviours: masculine/feminine, active/passive, productive/unproductive, desire/love, health/sickness, colonial/decolonial, and they continue to represent processes that favour the advancement of artistic, transgressive and political discourses.

The exhibition gathers together performance pieces, works, texts and documents, accompanied by other graphic material from projects, struggles or resistance efforts that Benlloch took part in and promoted. As a whole, it interweaves his actions and history with the history of others who had a place along the path of his artistic practice. The Miguel Benlloch Archive is made public for the first time and complements the investigations, creations and activities that he developed. It also features links to other archives that he was involved with.

Curators: Mar Villaespesa y Joaquín Vázquez (BNV Producciones)

Miguel Benlloch Marín (Loja 1954 - Seville 2018). Performance artist, poet, political and cultural activist. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a militant member of the Communist Movement and he was a driving force behind the creation of the Andalusian Homosexual Liberation Front (FLHA) and the anti-NATO movements. In 1983, together with Juan Antonio Peinado and Marino Martín, he set up the Planta Baja concert hall in Granada. Between 1986 and 1994, he formed part of the CUTRE CHOU group and the cabaret shows that they would stage every so often. He was a member of BNV Producciones since its inception in 1988. Between 2001 and 2015, he coordinated and produced the programme of the International University of Andalusia’s UNIA arteypensamiento (Art and Thinking). In 2006, he promoted the creation of the Platform for Reflection on Cultural Policies (PRPC), Seville. His performance art pieces and actions have been shown at The Kitchen, New York; Arteleku, San Sebastián; the Andalusian Contemporary Art Centre, Seville; the Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona; the Picasso Museum, Barcelona; Ex Teresa, Mexico DF; the National Art Museum and the Museum of Ethnography and Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia; Tabakalera, San Sebastian; C3A, the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Creation, Cordoba; and CentroCentro, Madrid, among other spaces. A selection of his texts and visual work has been compiled in the publication Acaeció en Granada (It Took Place in Granada), published by Ciengramos; and an anthology of his poems was published in Miguel Benlloch. Cuerpo conjugado (Conjugated Body), by Fundación Huerta de san Antonio.

See the exhibition on Flickr

  • With the participation of