Rosa Brugat Batlle (La Jonquera, Girona) is a multidisciplinary Spanish contemporary artist whose practice focuses primarily on photography, video art, and their expansion into installation realms, as well as performance, video-performance, and, more recently, electronic media and Artificial Intelligence to develop her visual narratives.

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An artist with an extensive creative career, she has developed projects and artworks that engage with diverse social issues. Her work brings forth a critical, questioning perspective on class and economic exploitation, racism, discrimination against other cultures and marginalized communities, and sociopolitical dominion, as well as the subordinate role of women in society, tackling sexist and gender stereotypes from feminist perspectives.

Numerous photographic works, video creations, video-performances, and live performances attest to these concerns and approaches.

 

Among them are pieces that harness a critical, social, political, and anthropological visual narrative without ever neglecting technical and aesthetic precision, or a vibrant, visual, and poetic drive. This commitment has even led her to conduct research and produce work in other countries and societies—immersing herself in their cultures, peoples, and struggles, while denouncing systems of domination, poverty, and colonization. Such was the case with her exhibition project Los sueños de Fátima (Fatima's Dreams), which I had the pleasure of curating: a photographic, installative, and audiovisual exhibition focusing on the lives of Berber families in Tafraoute Sidi Ali—a small desert village near the vast Erg Chebbi dunes in the Western Sahara—seen through the eyes of a young Berber girl as the protagonist.

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This approach is likewise evident in the work featured in this MAV catalog, Surveillance-control (2022), which earned an honorable mention at the Annual Photography Awards international competition. It follows her visual discourse imbued with social consciousness, critical insight, and denunciation of the conditions endured by societies and cultures that are slaughtered, monitored, and dominated by world powers and military, political, and economic interests—while offering us, in turn, the innocent gaze of a child. A Black child, symbolizing non-Western societies, with large, sorrowful eyes full of fear yet yearning for freedom, imprisoned behind an iron gate of apartheid, exclusion, and surveillance, set against a dark natural backdrop of blackish branches and tree trunks in a lightless night, monitored by a drone—a symbol of dominance and violence. A darkness akin to the one prevailing in the lives of so many children in Gaza, Sudan, Lebanon, and countless other places where suffering and despair are woven into their daily reality while the world does nothing to stop it. A striking, precise, and profound image that stirs consciences, cries out for action, and pierces our deepest emotions.