From 12 June to 25 October, the Cerralbo Museum is hosting Disfuncionarias, an exhibition by the artist from Barcelona, Tanit Plana, which uses installation photography to challenge the administrative logic of archives and the traditional systems of representation as part of the PHotoESPAÑA 2026 festival.
Tanit Plana (Barcelona, 1975) is part of a generation that has renewed Spanish photography, expanding it toward installation-based practices and challenging systems of representation by connecting images, politics and the body from a critical outlook.
Disfuncionarias is a site-specific installation in which the artist proposes a sensitive and critical approach to the bureaucratic body: the body that classifies, orders, inventories and stores everything that can be regulated, recorded or preserved. Through large-scale fabrics that cross the exhibition space, the installation explores the tension between the institutional logic that sustains the museum and the living reality of the collections, which always go far beyond any system of classification.
In this context, artificial intelligence appears as a contemporary extension of this administrative logic, not only expanding the field of the visible, but also introducing an organisational principle that turns the world into data, patterns and mathematical relations. Under this rationale, images, objects and documents become potentially indexable and processable, extending the archive’s historical aspiration to make the world legible, manageable and calculable. Printed on large fabrics, the images undergo a transformation from their rigid form. What initially appeared as a stable body of organised figures and finished compositions now unfolds on flexible surfaces that fold, curl and spill over into the surrounding space.
The fabric introduces a material dimension that alters the stability of the image, causing the displays to be deformed and displaced, losing its fixed contour until an almost organic condition is acquired. Covered volumes also emerge in the space, evoking the wrapped bundle, ambiguous presences that point towards something that is there without being fully revealed, a gesture that introduces a latent dimension of care and a remainder that persists without fully integrating into the symbolic order. Disfuncionarias is placed in this threshold between the mathematical logic that organises and the sensitive matter that insists on exceeding it, revealing the fragile balance that enables a museum to exist between archive and mystery.
Image Credits:
- Tanit Plana, from the Disfuncionarias series. © Tanit Plana
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