Guest Lectures: Josep Piñol
In his presentation at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Spanish conceptual artist Josep Piñol will trace the development of his practice through a selection of recent projects, using them as a point of departure to examine the economic, institutional, and political conditions that shape contemporary artistic production.
- Date
- 14 October 2026
- Location
- AVU Veletržní, Veletržní 61, Prague 7
The conversation will focus on the role that art can play in the ecosocial transition and in the context of the climate crisis, as well as on the relationships between political ecology, economics, institutions, and cultural production. Through recent works such as EVITADA and PRESERVADA, Piñol will examine his gradual shift away from the production of objects towards the use of contracts, audits, certifications, metrics, and real economic and legal operations as materials of artistic practice.
The talk will also address the processes of legitimation that shape an artist’s career: the relationship with museums, institutions, the market, and other systems of validation, as well as the tensions that emerge between artistic autonomy, institutional recognition, and the production of value.
Josep Piñol (Tivenys, 1994) is an artist working across performance, installation, and conceptual research. His work explores the intersection of ritual, institutional critique, and political ecology, focusing on how authority, legality, and value are enacted and contested in public space. Through situational devices, mimicry, and displacement, he brings systems of power, mediation, and legitimation into friction, exposing the gap between symbolic structures and their material consequences. Operating from within the regimes of legitimation that sustain these systems, he appropriates and reconfigures their languages to reveal their internal tensions. Far from offering consolation, his works are grounded in discomfort as a site of truth.