Biography

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Carlos Irijalba [Pamplona, 1979] former resident at the Rijksakademie of Amsterdam 2013/2014, Graduated at the Basque Country University and UDK Berlin en 2004.
Awarded with the Guggenheim Bilbao Photography Grant in 2003 and the Marcelino Botín Art Grant in 2007/08 also received the Shifting Foundation Grant and first Prize and the Revelation PhotoEspaña Prize among others. Irijalba has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the CCCB Barcelona, MUMA Melbourne or LMCC New York.

Irijalba’s work is driven by the principle of pertinence, the necessary or superfluous character of an object to cohabit the existing world. The drive to be selective and responsible for the objects we secrete, as sometimes silence or void is the best contribution. From that position the work focuses on the potential relation of object, image or installation to activate the places they inhabit and react towards an existing environment using human space-time scale as the measure to understand the world. The work reacts to the relative experience of time, space and the fictional construction of the territory. Here, geological tempo, natural and manmade cycles are crucial to position our dimension to enhance the criticality of the very current moment.

In recent projects as Skins 2015 or Muscle memory 2016 the exercise is exogenous to an existing system, if a physiological metaphor may apply, his work tries to act on a particular company or atelier as an enzyme that affects the result of a digestive process. When intervening on an atelier specialized in geological replicas, or another one developing metal foam tissue, he tres to mirror their activity for the work to become self-aware. In essence a distillation of an industrial dynamic’s own self, sometimes against their functional purpose, against the grain, to liberate new debris and connotations.

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