Concha Jerez: Our Memory is being Stolen, Exhibition, Reina Sofia, 29 July 2020-11 January 2021

Similarly, the Our Memory is being Stolen exhibition focuses on the themes of  Civil War, censorship and  the Transition and Memory from the 1970s until the present day. Jerez often looks at these themes in relation to forgotten, anonymous figures like women and migrants during this time.

Throughout the 1970s, Jerez made collages and drawings based on newspaper articles particularly related to repression and censorship (both political and artistic). Overtime, the nature of her artwork changed and she began to use technology: video, audio, photography, network pieces, performance and she even made sound pieces for the radio in the late 80s. Newspaper articles remained the starting point for many of her critical works and self-censored writing as did the themes of repression and censorship.

Our Memory is being Stolen was created by Joao Fernandes and for the first time in the museum’s history, it is spread across four rooms: the third floor of the Sabatini Building, the Protocol Room, the Vaults Gallery, and the stairway. The four stairways look at the relationship between memory and repression from different perspectives: Memory, self-censored Memory, written and oral Memory and silenced Memory. The use of these four spaces links to the passage of time and memory within the museum, which was once a hospital.

Jerez’s work has been awarded many prizes including the MAV Prize (2012), the National Award for Plastic Arts (2015) and the Velázquez Prize (2017), and she has been called a pioneer in promoting  Spanish conceptual art.