Gloria López Cleries
About Gloria López Cleries
Gloria López Cleries works as an artist, educator and researcher at the intersection of artistic research, visual culture and pedagogy. Originally from Valencia (Spain), López is based in Gothenburg, where she teaches on the MFA Fine Art programme, which focuses on developing research skills, publicness and the roles of art and artist in society.
López works with questions concerning how digital technology mediates and shapes our imagination, often through collective and cooperative practices. As a result of the combination of her specialised training in Fine Arts (Bachelor in Universidad Politécnica de Valencia and École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris), Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (MA in Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid) and Artistic Research (MFA Fri Konst HDK-Valand, Gothenburg) she has an understanding of theory and practice as intertwined.
López enquires how technology, specifically online social platforms, disciplines our minds and bodies by producing metaphors and narratives. In her practice, López investigates and plays with those visual codes through an aesthetic and critical approach to understand their functionality as signifier constructors. She conceives her research-based practice as a set of strategies to create deviations and re-signify mainstream visual codes to give rise to theoretical and poetic displacements. Manifestations of her projects have been exhibited and activated internationally at the cccb Barcelona (Spain), The Photographers’ Gallery (London), Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), Malmö Konstmuseum (Sweden), Kunsthalle Bratislava (Slovakia), among others.
In addition, López has a specific focus on creating spaces for critical thinking, and this is an orientation informing her pedagogical work and artistic research. López has actively participated in and co-directed critical and feminist pedagogy and collective research workshops internationally, both within and outside the institutional framework, in spaces that aim to rethink formal education and generate space for subaltern, collective and situated knowledges. For example, the project Questioning the Notion of Neutrality (2019-2022) was part of the research and study programme on critical pedagogy in the arts TTTT Teaching to Transgress Toolbox, founded by the European Union and developed transnationally by three art schools: erg (Brussels), HDK-Valand (Gothenburg) and ISBA (Besançon). This project collected and documented different perspectives on neutrality in education and academia. The interviews critically discussed the history of university institutions and the racist, patriarchal, ableist foundations on which they were built. Those foundations also expose how this continues to shape the institutions today – for example, through structural exclusions from the institutions and the hegemony of certain areas of knowledge. It was activated at the Paris College of Arty and the Villa Arson School of Art in France. Additionally, Exploring Autotheory Workshop (2019) was a collective research group which questioned the privileges and the need to rethink the narratives reproduced in an increasingly commodified and privatised education which creates isolated individuals.