Disfuncionarias. Tanit Plana (PHotoESPAÑA 2026)

As part of the PHotoESPAÑA 2026 festival programme, the Museo Cerralbo presents Disfuncionarias from 12 June to 25 October, a project by Barcelona-born artist Tanit Plana that uses installative photography to challenge the administrative logic of the archive and traditional systems of representation.

Tanit Plana (Barcelona, 1975) is part of a generation that has renewed contemporary Spanish photography, expanding it towards installation and questioning systems of representation by connecting image, politics and the body from a critical perspective.

In her project Disfuncionarias, a site-specific installation, the artist presents a sensitive and critical approach to the civil servant body: that body which classifies, sorts, inventories and stores that which is susceptible to being regulated, registered or preserved. Through large-format fabrics that cross the exhibition space, the work explores the tension between the institutional logic that sustains the museum and the living reality of the collections, which always exceed any classification system.

In this context, artificial intelligence appears as a contemporary extension of that administrative logic, as it not only broadens the field of the visible, but introduces an organisational principle that translates the world into data, patterns and mathematical relationships. Under this rationality, images, objects and documents become potentially indexable and processable, prolonging the historical aspiration of the archive to make the world legible, manageable and calculable. The images, printed on large fabrics, undergo a transformation of their rigid form; what initially presented itself as a stable body of ordered figures and closed compositions now unfolds across flexible surfaces that fold, ripple and overflow the space.

The fabric introduces a material dimension that alters the stability of the image, causing what is exhibited to deform, to displ