arts & culture

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge invites you to its latest exhibition, Permanent Red - John Berger. Berger (London, 1926 – Paris, 2017) was a central figure among those authors who, in the mid-20^th century, questioned formalist interpretations of how images should be read from a contemporary perspective.

Permanent Red is an exhibition named after the book of the same name, published in 1960, which brings together some of Berger’s art critiques for the Marxist magazine New Statesman, with which he collaborated for more than a decade, from 1951. These writings, well-known at the time, offered scathing readings targeted against bourgeois taste – the title itself is a provocation in this sense – and presented unknown or minority artists, anti-canonical works and analyses that disagreed with conservative historiography.

The exhibition focuses on the political nature of Berger’s career and his collaborations with photographers like Jean Mohr, filmmakers such as Mike Dibb and Alain Tanner, playwrights like Simon McBurney, and poets such as Mahmud Darwish.