The theme of the 56^th Venice Biennale is All the World's Futures and it is curated by Okwui Enwezor. This year the Biennale proposes a project devoted to a fresh appraisal of the relationship of art and artists with the current state of things.

The Spanish Pavilion at the Biennale is organised by the AECID with the collaboration of AC/E and is curated by Martí Manen.  Its project, entitled Los sujetos (The subjects), features works by the artists Pepo Salazar (Vitoria, 1972), Helena Cabello (Paris, 1963) & Ana Carceller (Madrid, 1964) and Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971). Los sujetos is intended to provide a very free view of Dalí through the works of the chosen creators. It is a direct dialogue that does not set out to illustrate the past from the present but shows a present that makes it possible to re-site creation, identity and a timeline from today’s perspective, from our current situation, from multiplicity. 

The artistic team formed by Cabello y Carceller produce interdisciplinary works including video, stage design, photography, writing and musicals in order to question the prevailing means of representation and propose critical alternatives. Their artistic work based around the idea of multiple identity and their proposal linked to feminism and queer thought make up a critical approach to Dalí that reveals intimate layers and allows the public and private realms to be positioned at the same political level.

Pepo Salazar, who lives in Paris, also combines photographs, videos, installations and objects in his creations, manipulating the meaning of representation in order to introduce a critical viewpoint. Like Dalí, Pepo Salazar broadens the scope of artistic action by overstepping norms and through extensive knowledge of what working in art means.

Francesc Ruiz takes as a basis the language of comics, which he uses “as a tool for contemporary art interventions, just as I could use video or another material”. If Dalí fully embraces the media and understands how they function, Ruiz goes one step further and makes them the setting for a surreal narrative, for a spatial deconstruction towards sensual narrative fields.