Loop is a platform dedicated to the study and promotion of the moving image. Founded in 2003, since its creation it offers a specialized audience a curated selection of video-related contents from challenging perspectives. While teaming up with an international community of artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and institution directors to develop projects which aim at exploring the capacities of video and film in today’s contemporary art discourses, it yearly hosts Loop Barcelona, a special meeting point that unfolds into three main sections.
Loop Fair 2024 / November 19–21, 2024
In this 22nd edition, individual and collective memories intersect and intertwine through the works on display. A spectral presence haunts these narratives, whether real or fictional. Ghosts from the past or future, whose poetic appearances unsettle, question, and take us away. They may reveal a need for reparation, involving a re-examination of history through perspectives beyond the colonial gaze, and a reinvention of identities through language and images.
Several artists also address how technology and capitalism continue to impact our environment and human bodies. AI, whose voice echoes our own, manifests itself across several works as an entity. It becomes a reflection of our own condition: fragmented and incomplete, yet eerily familiar.
Loop Festival 2024 / November 13–23, 2024
The 22nd edition of Loop Festival invites us to explore how different artistic gestures can provoke subtle yet significant tremors that, by raising awareness in the viewer, can ultimately affect power structures. We are inspired by the belief that every movement, whether it manifests as a violent earthquake, a devastating hurricane, or an uncontrollable fire, or arises from the subtlety of emotional reactions in our sensitive bodies, such as when our hair stands on end, is an uncontrollable response to experiences that deeply affect and condition us. These movements activate within us a further reflection that forces us to rethink our way of being in common with others in an environment besieged by environmental pressures.
Like a seismic chain of tremors gaining strength and intensity, like small waves accumulating to create a tsunami, these shared vibrations can provoke a rupture, a necessary collapse, a general shift in consciousness, a new way of perceiving the world. Thus, this tremor compels us to react, to look back from the present, and to take the necessary impulse to face the renewals that await us in the future.
Loop Symposium: Led by Filipa Ramos / November 20–21, 2024
Artists’ Cinema continues to escape definition and refuses to be pigeon-holed. It is an in-between creature that lives across the movie theatre and the exhibition space, that embraces and challenges the languages of cinema, that plays with genres and conventions, and that refuses to be reduced to be entertainment while not conforming to the rules of other art objects.
Maybe it’s easier to think about what Artists’ Cinema does instead of continuing to try to define what it is. Without doubt it has created unforgettable moments of joy, memorable experiences of encounter, and unique feelings of wonder. Artists’ Cinema pushes us towards what is yet to come, leading art towards its transformation and rooting it in the reality and imaginary of our present-future.
This year, Loop Barcelona will pursue its tradition of supporting artists’ cinema by hosting a two-day symposium focused on this topic. It will bring together artists, collectors, commissioners, curators, gallerists, programmers, producers, distributors and scholars to discuss important matters that concern Artists’ Cinema today and tomorrow, as to imagine the ways in which we can continue to help to create the Images that Move Us Forward.
We will bring together the greatest experts and artists’ cinema lovers and supporters—artists, collectors, commissioners, curators, gallerists, and programmers—to imagine the ways in which we can continue to support artists’ cinema with care and relevance. Panelists and moderators include: Gabriel Abrantes (Artist, Filmmaker), Guilherme Blanc (Batalha Centro de Cinema), Hoor Al-Qasimi (Sharjah Art Foundation), Julian Ross (Eye Filmmuseum), Kostas Stasinopoulos (Serpentine Gallery), Leonardo Bigazzi (Fondazione In Between Art Film), Lisa Long (Julia Stoschek Foundation), Paolo Moretti (Fondazione Prada), Sabel Gavaldon (MACBA), Sinazo Chiya (Stevenson Gallery) and Tarini Malik (John Akomfrah’s British Pavilion at 60th Venice Biennale).
Loop Barcelona 2024
November 13–23, 2024
Loop
Barcelona, Spain
