The return of the gaze. The political task of narrating." Paloma Polo at the Virreina Centre de la Imatge

Until March 1, 2026 you can visit at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge this exhibition by Paloma Polo curated by Mabel Tapia.

"All we have is the story," Ursula K. Le Guin stated through one of her characters in the novel The Telling. Far from the idea of history as an immutable, definitive, and unequivocal construct that would repeat endlessly ? even though sometimes that is claimed ? the narrative inscribes what is narrated in an affective-political transformation where past, present, and future are constantly at play at the same time. What are our stories? Where does history go when it is not narrated or when it is ideologically made invisible or suppressed? In what system-world does what is narrated get closed off, or conversely, to which worlds does it open us up? These questions are implicit and are updated in every act of storytelling, while transforming acquired narratives.

The projects of the artist Paloma Polo are crossed by these questions and by a fundamental contemporary commitment to what is defined as History in a constant and non-negotiable confrontation with it. Through lengthy processes of research, the artist approaches very specific historical events, narratives that have been part of the hegemonic colonopatriarchal foundations of our history, and others that have been discarded or silenced.

The exhibition is organized through four constellations that articulate works produced from 2010 to the present day. The first, The Mud of Revolution, places us directly in the Filipino context, in ancestral ways of life and knowledge that mobilize struggles for emancipation and social transformation. The second core, The Path of Totality, addresses the colonial logics underlying Western scientific expeditions and presents itself as the matrix for interrogations and methodologies that the artist develops. The third constellation, Dulcinea, focuses on two stories of militancy, struggle, and political commitment in the context of Franco's regime and the so-called Transition in Spain. Finally, the fourth core, Se jeter au fond du lac pour conserver sa vie (1), constitutes a new research field for the artist, who, by intervening in feminist genealogies, examines how indigenous thought, particularly the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, would have influenced feminist ideas forged around the French Revolution.

These constellations construct a complex and delicate network in which the relationships between specific historical contexts and transversal structural frameworks of socio-political and ideological organization become palpable. However, the current proposals do not aim in any way to question the inherited dominant history in a binary manner, but rather to intervene in it, in the narratives and in the tools used to construct them, which implies mobilizing the social and political structures that sustain it. This exhibition by Paloma Polo proposes to return the gaze and delve into the political task of storytelling.

(1) This sentence was taken from a quote by Kandiaronk, a political thinker and chief of the Native American Wendat tribe. The artist recovered it from the book Dialogues, ou Entretiens entre un Sauvage et le baron de Lahontan (1704).

It can be visited for free from Tuesday to Sunday and holidays, from 11 am to 8 pm.