MEDIA RELEASE
Francesca Martí – Passage
Haunt – Centre for Art and Ecologies in Berlin presents the work of Spanish artist Francesca Martí, in a solo exhibition opening in June titled Passage, curated by Mark Gisbourne, and co-curator Jonathan Turner.
With a focus on her recent video installations, sculptures, charcoal drawings and photo-based mixed media works, Passage traces the development of Martí’s innovative practice over the past two decades, exploring such essential themes as transformation, migration, regeneration, human fragility and freedom. Her works often highlight aspects of the rapidly changing world of communication, and how this can foster chaos. Instead of mimicking the tropes of mass media, Martí has developed a visual language which is both expressively original and deeply personal.
The current exhibition provides an overview of Martí’s artistic production, loosely based on Passage and Presence, the 208-page book written by Mark Gisbourne, Heike Fuhlbrügge, and 8 other international authors, and published by DCV in Berlin in 2023. It includes several sculptures which incorporate recycled satellite dishes, objects which the artist uses as symbols of post-modern archaeology. Once used as devices to receive broadcasts and imagery, Martí instead transforms the abandoned satellite dishes into autonomous artworks in themselves. They depict high-energy, distorted landscapes representing such cities as Beijing, Berlin, Madrid and New York, referred to by the artist as «cities in a crooked line». Her brand new Pillars of Memory are sculptures resembling skyscrapers. Elongated blocks are wrapped with her photographs of the mirrored facades of high-rise buildings, revealing her fascination with how urban settlements exist in a continual cycle of construction, destruction and rebuilding. At the same time, many of her latest works look at how humans – no matter how reliant we have become on technology – need to recognize the importance of remaining integrated as part of the natural world. Martí’s collages of enlarged leaves and her series Refugees into Nature further propose her idea of «the leaf as a symbol of the fragility of human life.»
First emerging in 2012, Martí’s Dreamers are human figures who reveal the handmade marks of their own creation, having been moulded in clay then reworked in a variety of materials including polished aluminium, bronze and wood. Pensive and calm, the Dreamers have evolved into Martí’s Believers (from 2018), striding out into the world, crossing borders like migrants in search of change. While her Believers are variously gathered together as communities of small sculptures or cast as larger-than-life, solitary figures, Martí’s visual research often focuses on the difference between the charismatic leader and the group dynamic. Her Green Swarm installation (2021), for example, tracks the behaviour of suspended metallic insects (the fly, butterfly and dragonfly), accompanied by soundtrack by Zack Hemsey and a video projection showing how as a group, they survive and thrive with teamwork.
Other video works in the exhibition include Cocoon – Into the Box (2007, a video projected into a cardboard box showing a performer trying to escape from a white fabric cloak), Ma’at (2017, an actress impersonating the ancient Egyptian goddess of cosmic harmony, order and judicial balance) and Copper Transmissions (2021, a performance by a group of 16 participants filmed in Stockholm, based on the healing nature of connectivity, liberty, memory and the nature of legacy).This attitude is also clearly visible in the Resilience installation (2026), created together with Rohan Marley, the son of Bob Marley. In the video Martí and Marley, each of whom lost their father at the age of 9, partake in a philosophical but disjointed conversation, discussing their views on honesty, dreams and sense of self. In the projection Martí herself morphs into one of her own Dreamer sculptures. As with all of Martí’s work, there is an undercurrent of curiosity and strength regarding the beliefs and values of society.
«The Resilience project is about owning our own destiny, our right to passage, our right to life,» said Rohan Marley.
Francesca Martí lives and works in her native Mallorca and in Stockholm. She emerged on the Spanish art scene in the early 1990s with solo and group exhibitions in Palma, Barcelona and Madrid. Since then she has exhibited in galleries and museums in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Jordan, South Korea, Turkiye, the U.S.A and beyond. In 2007, her Soul exhibition in the Spanish pavilion at the X International Biennale of Cairo (Egypt) was awarded first prize by the jury and in 2008 her Echoes solo show of video installations and paintings was staged at Es Baluard Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Palma de Mallorca. In 2017, the Danubiana Meulensteen Art Museum in Bratislava in Slovakia organized Transformation, a major retrospective of her work and in 2022, Martí’s Dreamers exhibition was launched as the inaugural exhibition at the new Xiao Hui Wang Museum in Shanghai. As well as in galleries in Dusseldorf, Munich, Cologne and Berlin, Martí’s work has been featured at the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2003) and at the 27th Rohkunstbau, Altdöbern Castle (2022). A new 64-page book has been published to accompany Martí’s Passage solo exhibition at Haunt in Berlin.
For a complete list of solo and group exhibitions: www.francescamarti.com/exhibitions
PASSAGE – Francesca Martí
HAUNT – Centre for Art and Ecologies
Anita-Augspurg-Str. 23A Yard
(former Kluckstraße 23 A)
D – 10785 Berlin
www.hauntberlin.de
IG #haunt_berlin
Opening times
6 June – 4 July 2026
Wed to Sat 2 – 6 pm
and by appointment
Vernissage Sat 6 June 5 – 9 pm
Finissage Sat 4 July 5 – 8 pm