Cabello. Paris, France, 1963 / Carceller. Madrid, Spain, 1964
Live and work in Madrid, Spain
Cabello/Carceller is an artist team composed of Helena Cabello and Ana Carceller. While informed by contemporary theory — primarily although not exclusively feminist and queer theory — Cabello/Carceller maintain an independent political position from which they analyze and critique the gendered politics of space and socially imposed mechanisms of representation that permeate cultural and political realms.
Forcefully polemical in its discourse and yet more open-ended and elusive in its execution, the interdisciplinary work of Cabello/Carceller employs a wide range of media — photography, video, installation, drawing, participatory and collaborative events, lectures, writing and teaching — while freely referencing source-material from history, politics, philosophy, film and contemporary art and society. Via their avid readings of contemporary culture (and above all of cinema), Cabello/Carceller move deftly between the general and the particular in order to arrive at alternative models of beauty, freed from binary stereotypes of femininity and masculinity.
Cabello/Carceller frequently convert the exhibition site into an all-purpose, de facto mise-en-scene, where the representation of experience is replaced by representation as experience. As a result, their work is able to reflect back onto the rigid but often hidden mechanisms of representation that lie within society, particularly in its imposed cultural construction of gender roles.
