arts & culture

With the referendum on November 9th, there's no escaping the debate on the independence of Catalunya – at every party the subject comes up and unsurprisingly everyone has an opinion.

But open discussion is uncommon. Collective exhibition *Sekw, commissioned by Alex Brahim, was conceived to bring these private conversations into the public realm, featuring works from a series of contemporary Catalan artists exploring varying aspects to the issue.

Obra Social Son Goku replaces elements of the Spanish coat of arms with images from the video game Super Mario Bros. in Intervención Sobre el Escudo de Armas del Estado Español, an act of subversion against an institutional symbol which also questions how identity is constructed.

Serving as its visual navigation, the exhibition presents 50 words in Catalan and Spanish that derive from the same Latin origin 'sequor, sequi, secutus sum' (meaning 'to follow'), a reminder of the blurred division between 'for' and 'against,'' 'self' and 'other.'

The exhibition, which bravely showed earlier this year in Madrid, works to deconstruct a simplistic dialectic and to convert it into something more human: a conversation.