Carlos Irijalba [Pamplona, 1979] former resident at the Rijksakademie of Amsterdam 2013/2014, Graduated at the Basque Country University, a traditional haven for sculpture. His work, however, assumed the three-dimensional practice on an interventional level, using the environment as a material by itself. He soon embarked upon an investigation on time and space that led him to use photography and video as his most common tools. In his search, light played a vital role, not so much as a motif to be represented but as a narrative and conceptual device. Take for instance Twilight, one of his most acclaimed works, where he displaced a light tower from a football stadium and relocated it in Irati one of the few rainforests remaining in Europe. His quest was to explore the construction of reality through light, as the true image of spectacle in Western civilization. 

Awarded with the Guggenheim Bilbao Photography Grant in 2003 and the Marcelino Botín Art Grant in 2007/08 also received the Shifting Foundation Grant and First Prize and the Revelation PhotoEspaña Prize among others. Irijalba has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the CCCB Barcelona, MUMA Melbourne or LMCC New York.

Irijalba’s work is driven by the principle of pertinence, the necessary or superfluous character of an object to cohabit the existing world. The drive to be selective and responsible for the objects we secrete, as sometimes silence or void is the best contribution. From that position the work focuses on the potential relation of object, image or installation to activate the places they inhabit and react towards an existing environment using human space-time scale as the measure to understand the world. The work reacts to the relative experience of time, space and the fictional construction of the territory. Here, geological tempo, natural and manmade cycles are crucial to position our dimension to enhance the criticality of the very current moment.