FRIDAY 19 SEPTEMBER | 17:00 | ARTIST TALK | ART IN THE FACE OF COLLAPSE

Sebastián Díaz Morales will present a selection of his works and projects with video excerpts, exploring recurring themes and various forms. In a second part, the artist will be in conversation with art critic Ernst van Alphen about his recent works, offering the audience a unique perspective on his artistic practice.

The session will be followed by a drink

In this conversation, we will explore the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of the video series El cielo cayendo (Under the Falling Sky), focusing on how art can confront—and reframe—systemic crises without surrendering to apocalyptic despair.

Ernst van Alphen’s pioneering work on visuality, trauma, and historical memory offers a critical framework to discuss the series’ central questions: Can art represent collapse without becoming its spectacle? How do glitches, repetitions, and deliberate “failures” in the works serve as forms of resistance to smooth, consumable narratives of disaster?

We will examine how the camera functions not as a passive recorder but as an active agent—a diseased yet diagnostic organ—that metabolizes violence, ecological erosion, and migration crises into new visual codes. The conversation will also address the role of sound as reverse archaeology, the use of maquettes as speculative landscapes, and the ethical implications of making art in—and about—an age of perpetual crisis.

This dialogue aims to open a broader discussion on art’s capacity to disrupt conditioned ways of seeing and imagine forms of solidarity and sensing otherwise.

Biography of Sebastián Díaz Morales

Sebastián Díaz Morales was born in Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina, in 1975 and lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. He attended the Universidad del Cine de Antin in Argentina from 1993-1999, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam from 2000-2001, and Le Fresnoy, Roubaix, France from 2003-2004. Diaz Morales’s conception of reality has been shaped by the living conditions and landscape of his birthplace, Comodoro Rivadavia, an industrial city located on the Atlantic coast, in a rugged area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Patagonian Desert in southern Argentina.

His work has been exhibited widely at venues—such as the Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou; Stedelijk Museum and De Appel, Amsterdam; Le Fresnoy, Roubaix; CAC, Vilnius; Art in General, New York City; Ludwig Museum, Budapest; Biennale Sao Pablo; Biennale of Sydney; Miro Foundation, Barcelona; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; the Biennale di Venezia and Documenta Fifteen.

His works can be found at the collections of the Centre Pompidou; Tate Modern; Fundación Jumex, Mexico; Sandretto Foundation, Torino; Lemaître's collection; Constantini collection, Buenos Aires; Pinault Foundation, Paris; Sammlung-Goetz, Munich; and the Fundacion de Arte Moderna, Museo Berardo, Lisbon between others. In 2009 he was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Díaz Morales’s questioning of reality in film, whether concerning landscape, the urban, or even the sociopolitical, has been marked from the very outset by a fundamental distrust of the belief in a single, unified reality. With Díaz Morales, the camera does not function as a medium for faithfully depicting and recording what is observed, but is an essential, even epistemic means for questioning and appropriating reality.

His examination of perception and reality is based on the assumption that reality itself is by nature highly fictional. Thus, his films do not simply transport the viewer into another, surreal, or phantasmal realm, but they strip reality of its familiarity and distort it, making it seem like something else. With Diaz Morales, the viewer’s imagination does not function as a basic counterpart to the real. Rather, it operates as a force capable of evoking space and producing it diegetically, one that, beyond generating a direct visual impression, fills in the gaps in seeing and, as the film unfolds, gradually reveals to the viewer the constructedness of what we call reality. Reality is presented here as a phantasm, as something that always eludes its defining in images. It is therefore always “a little bit ahead” of the image and the viewer’s gaze. (Adapted from an article by David Komary)

Biography of Ernst van Alphen

Ernst van Alphen is Emeritus Professor of Literary Studies and Cultural Analysis at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. Particularly interested in issues central to modern and postmodern literature and in the relation between literature, critical theory and the visual arts, his work encompasses research on articulations between trauma and memory and their role in literary and artistic representation, gender studies, and problems related to archive, image and photography. Amongst numerous publications, Van Alphen authored books such as Seven Logics of Sculpture. Encountering Objects Through the Senses (Valiz 2023), Productive Archiving. Artistic Strategies, Future Memories, Fluid Identities (Ed. Valiz 2023), Logs of Sculpture (2022, in press), Un/Productive Archiving (2022, in press), Shame! and Masculinity (ed. Valiz 2021), Failed Images. Photography and Its Counter-Practices (Valiz 2018), Staging the Archive: Art and Photography in Times of New Media (2014), Art In Mind: How contemporary Images Shape Thought (2005), Armando: Shaping Memory (2000), Caught by History: Holocaust effects in contemporary art, literature and theory (1997), and Francis Bacon and the Loss of Self (1992). As co-editor, also published How to Do Things with Affects – Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices (with Tomáš Jirsa, 2019), and The Rhetoric of Sincerity (with Mieke Bal & Carel Smith, 2009).