We live in fast-moving times, when many of our society’s guiding values have fallen by the wayside. We might get the feeling of staring into the abyss, or even being in free fall, but we can also see our present as full of future possibilities. The new exhibition at CaixaForum Barcelona, In Free Fall , uses the image of falling as a metaphor for these profound changes. The show takes thirteen works by eleven contemporary artists to illustrate and explore this moment of structural crisis. The project stretches back to 1971, with the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system, which had regulated the world economy since the end of the Second World War. After its collapse, financial transactions were freed from their material shackles, sending out social, political, ecological, anthropological and psychological shockwaves that led to a widespread feeling of instability and unease, an abiding sense of staring into the abyss that is still with us today.

The show is curated by Lisbon-born João Laia, one of the three winners of the latest Call for Curator Applications run by ”la Caixa” as part of its Programme of Support for Artistic Creation, and will feature works from the ”la Caixa” and MACBA collections. Its centrepiece is Àngels Ribé’s large transparent installation Laberint (1969–2019), whose spiral shape evokes the disorientating instability of the here and now. It is surrounded by a constellation of pieces made between 1969 and the present day by Dara Birnbaum+Dan Graham, Runa Islam, Andreas Gursky, Rosemarie Trockel, Iman Issa, The Otolith Group, Georg Baselitz, June Crespo and Pedro Barateiro. In addition, Catalan poet Eduard Escoffet has taken over the audio guide and created a sound piece expressly for the show, Ones gravitacionals, featuring eight sound gestures that enter into dialogue with the artworks on display.