Cabello/Carceller: The State of the Art

Cabello/Carceller showcase “The State of the Art,” a performative essay exploring symbolic power and social exclusion.

Get a free double ticket to the opening night of Spanish Cinema Now 2025 at the AFI Silver Theatre. Join us on Thursday, May 29, at 6:30 pm at the Spanish Cultural Center; the first 15 attendees who arrive with a guest will receive a free double ticket to the festival’s opening night on Friday, May 30, at 7 pm. Screening of They Will Be Dust, followed by a Q&A with director Carlos Marqués-Marcet and a reception.

The State of the Art —a performative essay, in the format of a short film— occupied two rooms of the Spanish Pavilion at the Giardini during the 56th Venice Biennale. This site-specific project was created for the exhibition The Subjects, curated by Martí Manen, which took as its point of departure the institutionalized, controversial, and misogynistic figure of Salvador Dalí. In a historical moment marked by the redefinition of aesthetic and political practices in European democracies, The State of the Art explores the twisted ways in which symbolic power perpetuates new forms of social exclusion.

Set within a surreal space, the four characters of The State of the Art interact from a micropolitical standpoint, positioned at the intersection of dissident sexualities and marginalization. They meet in an absurd time-space continuum —mirroring the absurd conditions inhabited by forms of resistance in the West, where life is slowed by waiting, and society, driven by market forces, makes us hover above pain.

The audiovisual work is conceived as a performative fiction essay, divided into five acts, and takes place in the very location where it was first presented: inside the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Filming occurred during the in-between period of abandonment, when one exhibition is dismantled and another prepared. The narrative incorporates the pavilion’s symbolic role, both as a representative of the Schengen Area and as a metaphor for a country debilitated by an economic crisis —one triggered by neoliberal policies, which have fueled a desire among the younger population to flee in search of opportunity and a future. Drawing from Brechtian, feminist, queer, and experimental B-movie drag aesthetics— while infused with a Tropicamp sensibility— the film’s sequences unfold as a journey through which the characters move.

The story begins with a migrant woman crossing the border, slipping furtively through the barriers enclosing the Spanish Pavilion. She carries with her a painting that symbolizes the nightmare of her illegal journey: a stormy sea. After spending a lonely first night, she encounters three other characters waiting in one of the pavilion’s rooms. They are there for a job selection process —a casting call— meant to lead to stable employment. This period of waiting also defines the narrative’s temporal frame: a liminal space where the four young people reside in a story that offers no conclusion.

— Cabello/ Carceller

The screening will be followed by an artists’ talk and a Q&A session.

Cabello/Carceller

Cabello/Carceller have been collaborating since the early 1990s, with the aim of questioning hegemonic constructions of gender in visual practices, while proposing alternative poetics from queer perspectives.

Their work was featured in the 35th Bienal de São Paulo (Brazil, 2023) and in its subsequent iteration at the MNAC in La Paz (Bolivia, 2024). They were part of the Spanish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, and have held solo exhibitions at Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid, 2023), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao, 2022), MUAC (Mexico City, 2019), CA2M (Madrid, 2017), MARCO (Vigo, 2016), and IVAM (Valencia, 2016), as well as in art centers in Denmark, Philadelphia, Buenos Aires, among others.

Their projects have also been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou (Paris), MACBA (Barcelona), tranzit.sk (Bratislava), Museu da Electricidade (Lisbon), Museo Reina Sofía – MNCARS (Madrid), Casino Luxembourg, and the Brooklyn Museum (New York).

In 2024, they were finalists for the Fundación MACBA Prize and received the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture.

They are currently participating in the group exhibition Ways of Knowing at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (USA), and have recently opened the solo show La habitación gris: Escenario 1 at the Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery in Barcelona.

They live and work in Madrid. Their practice is rooted in research, writing, and performance, as well as various curatorial formats, which they combine with teaching at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cuenca (UCLM).