Rhythms

Rhythms. Images of Feminine Labor explores, by way of a selection of materials from the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre, the changes and continuities which brought women’s work and identity together before, during and after the Spanish Civil War. The exhibition sets forth a journey which seeks to render the power of images of working women in shaping individual and collective subjectivity and is completed with the presentation of an unreleased audiovisual production, made by Julia Montilla, which examines part of the research conducted.

The show is an exhibition of paper, and on paper, which surveys the documentary work of the curators — a process by which the gestures of women’s work, and its rhythms and repetitions, have been updated in their own bodies. Along this same line, the choice of materials — and the way they are gathered — reflects the importance of their varied objectual condition in the research; equally, it reveals the researchers’ relationship with the images found in the library holdings: encounters, surprises, serendipities, certainties, anachronisms and doubts. As a result, a survey is established around the processes and forms of thought, granting them a key role in constructing knowledge and the story they wish to tell.