Felipe Romero Beltrán explores the liminal realities of migration in his multimedia, long-term project. In the juxtaposition of the Dialect series with the three channel video projection Recital , documentation and staging merge into an ambiguous yet powerful narrative about waiting, companionship, and the conditions of migration, both bureaucratic and linguistic. Over the course of three years, Beltrán accompanied a group of minors from Morocco who had entered Spain irregularly and were placed in a temporary center while awaiting permission to legally immigrate. It can take up to three years for these youth to receive resident status, at which point they are legally declared adults. Trapped in limbo, they fill the time with sports, personal hygiene, and conversation.
Beltrán experiments with a visual understanding similar to documentary photography, an anticipation that quickly dissolves in the irritating artificiality of the scenes. The images bear witness to the photographer’s sensitive empathy, yet simultaneously reveal his distinct artistic style. His extremely precise compositions succeed in posing questions about identity, power dynamics, and social structures, while at the same time creating a completely new imagery that resists clear typological classification. Beltrán’s images achieve a dual impact, in which their visual potency supercedes their narrative power. His work fosters a subtle yet profound reflection on migration not only as a geographical phenomenon but also as a bureaucratic, social, and emotional experience. Through his staged compositions, he renders the monotony and inertia of time almost tangible, using the body as a metaphor. His images, reminiscent of Renaissance religious paintings, exude a sacred, almost wax-like quality. They allude to waiting as an existential condition—the anticipation of a promise, of a life poised to unfold but frozen at themoment captured on photograph, existing merely as a distant ideal.
Beltrán’s photographs depict the reality of these young men while also conveying the artificiality of the situation. The protagonists, asked to re-enact specific scenes from their lives, appear as figures caught between worlds, between different forms of belonging. The meticulous composition and choreography of the images amplifies this impression. The stagnation dominating the photographs paradoxically expresses the perpetual movement of people pursuing the dream of a better future, yet trapped within political and bureaucratic cycles. We witness fragmentary, re-enacted moments of a still unfolding process, observe people caught in a system that defines their lives but only partially accept them. ...
Sebastian Klemm and Silvia Bonsiepe founded KLEMM’S as a gallery for contemporary art in 2007. They represent artists from different generations, cultural backgrounds and media whose work is linked by their shared interests in the transformation of experienced reality and distinctive critique of contemporary social currents. Klemm’s supports positions and artists who work to overcome limitations in content and form, bringing new approaches to the interrogation of their medium.
It is important for Klemm’s to support and accompany the artists through the early stages of their development and steadily foster their development and careers in a progressive international context. In conceiving the program, it is essential for them to offer the artists a platform that allows their conceptual approaches to unfold individually and also to reflect upon and enhance each other.
Alongside solo exhibitions of represented artists, Klemm’s hosts carte-blanche projects by invited curators, artist-curated exhibitions and regular film screenings or artist talks. In an effort to promote and deepen the critical dialogue about the development of artistic expression, Klemm’s works closely with the artists to actively document their projects and new work with unique publications and artists’ books. ...
