The exhibition runs through 27 November and presents a slate of artistic projects that invite visitors to explore perception from multiple angles. These works include Chris Bartual’s exploration of mirrors, Paul Sandoval’s unusual relationship with nature, David Mocha’s Rabasa: Imaginary Map of a Useless Region, Ferdinand Bayonne’s Source, and Andrea Corrales’ Critical research methodologies #2 visual contrasts and speculative realities.
Throughout the residency period, artists shared their creative methods and workflows, turning MUA into a hub for contemporary art research and production.
Projects
dive into the mirror
Chis Bartual seeks to push photography beyond a flat representation, inviting a tactile, physical encounter with images. His residency project, Immerse yourself in a mirror, invites viewers to step inside photographs, traveling through them to discover new places. In his studio practice, he experiments with tools such as cameras and scanners, focusing on the intimate zones of his surroundings to generate fresh visual realities. These realities arise from both instrument malfunctions and creative discoveries. Photography emerged two centuries ago as a way to depict reality, yet it now creates multiple realities. Immerse yourself in a mirror examines how the photographic device shapes what can be said through images that reveal unseen textures. The project title points to the unknown, suggesting that passing through a mirror is akin to moving through an image on a screen and discovering a new way to represent what is already known.
unusual nature
The Last Heaven explores the allure of rarity and wonder, a cornerstone of scientific curiosity that has driven collecting since the Renaissance. It also probes how natural sciences, documentaries, major discoveries, and language shape our understanding of objects. The goal is to map how these narratives are built, how myths arise from unseen or intuited things, and how museum displays and cataloging systems influence our reading of images. The project considers how histories of objects are formed, true or not, and how fantastical beings emerge from familiar materials. It recalls examples from science where memory alone pictured a giraffe or a long-necked animal, or where a stuffed crocodile doubles as a dragon in church ceilings. A mural plan proposes diverse channels of transmission that combine research, video, painting, drawing, and even artificial intelligence to reframe how images travel across media.
Rabasa: Imaginary Map of a Useless Region
Rabasa presents a stark, decayed landscape on Alicante’s outskirts, existing in a fragile balance with the city and operating at the edge of urban life. It is a non-utopian place, resistant to progress, inviting a shift away from conventional beauty ideals toward an alternative aesthetic measured by absence and restraint. The project examines what it means to inhabit the margins of the city, to live in landscapes that acknowledge absence, insecurity, and ascetic simplicity. Walking through Rabasa invites viewers to slow down, to resist the typical urban rhythm, and to experience a form of attention that blends the material and the sensory. The aim is to offer a new way to perceive both the region and the people who move through it.
Source
Source investigates how the human hand participates in the evolution of modern cognition and culture. The work links anatomical development with the emergence of symbolic thought, tracing how early marks and tools influenced subsequent artistic production. The project documents spaces where early expressions occurred, the materials and tools involved, and the resulting visual forms such as cave paintings and engravings. Focusing on three cave sites in Málaga province, Ardales, El Tesoro, and Nerja, it compiles dozens of images dated to more than 65,000 years ago. The photographs compress vast stretches of human history into a compact visual record. They transport viewers to a primitive museum landscape that invites modern viewers to reflect on the lineage from hand to screen, from lithic technology to contemporary digital devices. The images emphasize how drawing, carving, and tactile exploration connect to the evolution of technology and perception.
Critical research methodologies #2 visual contrasts and speculative realities
Critical Methodologies #2, created by Andrea Corrales Devesa as part of her doctoral inquiry Images from below. Infrastructures, materials and institutional realities in the production of online pornography, examines how material contexts shape imagined worlds. The project explores whether different material conditions might have yielded alternate image cultures within digital industries. It probes the relationship between the tangible world and the imaginary in the making of explicit material online, asking how material and symbolic layers intertwine in production. Centered on twelve interviews with industry workers, the work surveys recurring tensions within this highly gendered field, including methods of data collection, care, and representation that hinge on tactical opacity and consent-based practices. [Citation: MUA]