As part of its programme featuring mid-career artists, the CGAC is delighted to present an individual exhibition of the work of Mar Caldas, a pioneer of feminist art in Galicia. Her work, which is fundamentally photographic, is constantly renewing its stance as a means of protest against the different obstacles which, by their very nature, threaten women’s lives.

On this occasion, she invites us on a tour of her recent work, in which women’s work and an indictment of its low esteem, past and present, play a central discursive role. Her proposal speaks of the reality facing Galician women in the labour market over the course of three generations.

The granddaughter of an assassinated trade unionist, Caldas demands her identity as a transgenerational victim of the Franco regime be recognised: the granddaughter of a widow doomed to poverty and deprivation and the daughter of a female telephone operator forced to give up her job on getting married. The exhibition is spread over three rooms and also has a documentary annex. With photography taking centre stage, it displays a wide range of formalisations: photographic collage with fitting images, photographic series in large format of her own creation, the projected photographic image by way of an installation and as the basis of a filmic work… and even a photographic piece in the form of a ‘take-away card.’ The third room will be given over to the project titled ‘Portrait of a Family,’ carried out ad hoc for this exhibition.

Mar Caldas’ work is conceptually dense, the result of continuous and laborious investigation, yet synthetic from a formal perspective, and it always seeks to prioritise communication with the spectator. This investigation impinges on both the limits and history of photography as a medium—in its uses and formalisations inside and beyond the field of art—as well on as other areas, in accordance with the specific needs of each project.

The artist’s probing in the fields of contemporary history and the history of modern art is embodied in the form of a genre painting or scene. In what we could call a poetic way, Caldas engages in an archaeological practice: finding and analysing artefacts generated by academic art and professional photography. In this way, through art, she reconstructs the context in which certain pieces of Galicia’s material culture were created, to reveal women’s presence buried in the historical register.