Book launch of Los durmientes, by Enrique Ramírez. In the context of Barcelona Gallery Weekend

Presentation of Los durmientes (The Sleepers), a book by the artist Enrique Ramírez. The launch will take place on Saturday September 29th at 18.30 h, in the Auditorium of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies. The book is the outcome of the homonymous project, which has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos, Santiago de Chile, Chile; the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico, among others. The art critic and curator Martí Peran, alongside the curator and researcher Luz Muñoz, will be presenting the book in an open dialogue with the attending audience. The event will take place in the context of Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2018.

“Enrique Ramírez explores a historic wound within himself and begins his journey at the point of its own dissolution: the sea. Nature devours history and scatters it into oblivion. In the end, the journeys of migrants resemble some of the most horrific historical accounts, for they are ‘tails at sea’, as stated by Antonio Machado. Humankind then cruelly takes advantage of this and uses nature to hide history. True, soil and stones are used to both mark and commemorate, but also to hide and put behind….” Claudio Lomnitz (*)

Enrique Ramírez (1979) works across video, photography, installations and poetic narrations. He delves into stories within stories, fictions that overlap time periods and countries, mirages between the dream world and reality. Often, Ramírez uses images combined with sound to orchestrate an outpour of intrigue while making use of the equilibrium between the poetic and the political.
In 2014 he won The Découverte des Amis of the Palais de Tokyo. Since then, he has exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, the Centre Pompidou and the Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris, and Le Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, in France. In Latin America, at the Museo Amparo in Puebla, Mexico; the Museo de la Memoria y Los Derechos Humanos, the Museo de Artes Visuales (MAVI) and the Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerrillos, Chile; and the Centro Cultural MATTA at the Chilean Embassy in Argentina, among others.
In 2017 Enrique Ramírez’s work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in the show Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel. Since 2010, Ramírez lives and works between Paris and Santiago.

* Lomnitz, Claudio. “The Exiles of Enrique Ramírez”, in El tiempo, el ánimo, el mundo. Puebla, Mexico: Museo Amparo, 2015.