Infrastructure and the Heretic
A talk by Àngels Miralda on institutional power, the artist as heretic, curatorial dissent, and the resistance of the independent art scene.Organized by the Studio for Art and Image | Expansion, as part of the lecture series by the Institute of Fine Arts.
The lecture discusses how art institutions (such as museums and galleries) are not only places that exhibit art, but also function as tools that produce ideology, power relations, and economic structures. It explains how institutions often absorb critical art into the system and thereby neutralize its impact, while artists and cultural workers still try to develop new forms of solidarity and organization both within and against these institutions. Overall, it focuses on labor, class, and institutional critique in the art world.
Àngels Miralda works loosely on the connection between landscape and identity. How is culture formed through the outlines of mountains, the consistency of soil, and the availability of fresh water? Human identity is a negotiation with our material surroundings. Imperialism, as a cultural model, is an accumulation of imposed forms and cultures that are out of sync with their external reality and upheld by politically servile institutions.
Miralda is internationally recognized for theoretical and critical texts such as Who Killed the Independent Curator?, published in Frieze Magazine, as well as for her four-year tenure as editor-in-chief of Collecteurs Magazine, which consistently called for institutional accountability in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Over the last ten years, she has organized more than 60 exhibitions, including the large-scale international biennials Contemporary Biennial TEA (2024) and two editions of Off-Biennial Cairo (2023 & 2025). She has curated institutional exhibitions at MAAC (Guayaquil), Radius CCA (Delft), Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile (Santiago), Museu de Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira, Azores), and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga). As a writer, Miralda has published texts in publications and artist monographs with publishers such as Phaidon Press, Cukrarna, TBA21, IVAM, and GRIMM Gallery, among many others.