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![A two way at la Bianyal]( "A two way at la Bianyal")
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![Two way at Grey Space in the middle]( "Two way at Grey Space in the middle")
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![Home cinema exhibition at Laak Club]( "Home cinema exhibition at Laak Club")
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![Outside is scary and inside is lonely, we need a third place]( "Outside is scary and inside is lonely, we need a third place")
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![Existing online is selling our bodies]( "Existing online is selling our bodies")
infoExhibition at Royal Academy of Art The Hague Graduation Show 2023
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Music video
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![SpreadMag]( "SpreadMag")
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![Send the dick back installation]( "Send the dick back installation")
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![Self-portrait]( "Self-portrait")
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Reversing the relationship between lens-based medium and power by generating an interdisciplinary and collaborative practice that tests the affordances of the internet as a platform that generates, distributes and polices visibility.
Helena is a visual artist who lives between The Hague and Barcelona. Although she started taking pictures a decade ago as a documentary/portrait photographer, her practice has evolved into an interdisciplinary and collaborative practice, based on testing the perverse relationship between medium and power. Understanding consent as the common denominator of her work, she uses the camera to reverse and deconstruct ideas such as the patriarchal gaze and look for practices of collective self-defense.
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, she began exploring the political aspects of digital privacy from a xenofeminist perspective that implies a view on technology as a tool directed by certain ideologies, and while questioning their priorities, rejecting naturalism with an aim to abolish gender and/or gender oppression.
Her methodology aims to create horizontal relationships and make work in dialogue, while exploring online representation, censorship, otherness, care and desire. She plays with the processes and hierarchies in participative processes together with all the affordances of the internet as a platform that generates, distributes and polices visibility.
Websites
Personal website
helenaroig.onlineSocial media
Member of Artists’ Initiative/Collective/Incubator
Trixie Den Haag
Member of a professional association/artists’ association
Trixie the hague
Curriculum vitae
Education
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2019 - 2019Gender equality prevention Institut Joan Maragall
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2019 - 2023Photography Den Haag, Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten diploma
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2017 - 2017Designing participatory photography and art projects El observatorio barcelona
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2016 - 2016Transit Tales Seminar: Participatory Photography with Migrant people Fuga Fotografia Barcelona
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2016 - 2016SRL camera filming Fuga Fotografia Barcelona
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2015 - 2015Gender Islamophobia: tools to decolonize the gaze La ciutat invisible Barcelona
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2015 - 2015Photojournalism and Social Photography Fuga Fotografia Barcelona
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2014 - 2014Creative Documentary and Contemporary Photography Fuga Fotografia Barcelona
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2013 - 2013Photography Project 3 Blank Paper Photography School (Madrid/Spain
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2012 - 2012Portraiture Photography monograph course IEFC
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2012 - 2012Ethnography and Visual Anthropology monograph course Natalia Matzner
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2012 - 2012Ubran direct action photography workshop Tabacalera Madrid
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2010 - 2012Superior studies in Graphic Design Escola d'Art i Superior de Disseny d'Olot
exhibitions
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2023Drams XXL Laak and Home cinema The Hague, Netherlands Dreams present themselves as cinematic experiences. homecinema.video/open-call-xxl-dreams Group
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2023Group gossip Espai nyamnyam During a two-week residency in Mieres, Spain, @espainyamnyam and @ajuntamentmieres invited me to create a collaborative site-specific work together with the residents of the aforementioned town. nyamnyam.net/sinovolspols/ Solo
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2023Reclaiming digital agency IMPAKT FESTIVAL Utrecht, Netherlands CODE is an annual, six-month co-creation project that brings together artists and non-artists from Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries. CODE supports them over the entire project in a process of collaborative inspiration, development and production. impakt.nl/festival/2023/exhibitions/ Group
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2023
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2022Unfolding Territories The Grey Space in the Middle The Hague, Netherlands cockroach-collective.com/otherly/Helena_Roig/index.html Group
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2022Bolit Contemporary art center Girona, Spain Bòlit_Mentor is a project that combines education and creativity with a pilot program based on experience and that started in 2012 with the aim of establishing a future and fruitful connection between the schools and cultural centers of the city. web.girona.cat/bolit/exposicions/2022/dins-i-fora Group
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2022
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2022
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2021
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2021Cabaret Internet Hangar Barcelona Barcelona, Spain Cabaret Internet is a meeting point dedicated to experiment with the limits of entertainment by offering playful space to presents shows, performances and small live interventions. Since July 2019 Cabaret Internet has landed their mothership at Sala Vol, El Pumarejo and Abaixadors10. Fasten your seatbelt //hangar.org/en/activitats-en-collaboracio/willem-de-haan-cabaret-internet-spread-mag/ Group
Projects
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2023
Group Gossip nyamnyam Mieres, Spain www.helenaroig.online/project/safreig-grupal-sense-fer-nos-mal During a two-week residency in Mieres, Spain, @espainyamnyam and @ajuntamentmieres invited me to create a collaborative site-specific work together with the residents of the aforementioned town. I worked closely with a 13-year-old boy and with some other inhabitants of the town to discuss and visually explore what gossip meant in the past and how it is perceived and utilized today in a town of 250 inhabitants. This was a curious case since it is considered that the ideal amount of people required to facilitate gossip is 150. Given this premise, the collaboration exists on the threshold of a bare minimum, but the networks of gossip can still be monitored and mapped. The outcome of this collaboration was presented in the form of an interactive exhibition that mixed video installation, performance, and sound art to create a space for discussion and confrontation with the controversial topic between visitors, the artist and participants.
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2023
Impakt Festival Pay with your gaze, Netherlands code.impakt.nl/projects/ A critical exploration of the use of eye tracking technolgy and nudging strategies by big tech companies.
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2023
Existing online is selling our bodies Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands www.helenaroig.online/project/existing-online-is-selling-our-bodies-stills This work is a visual performative response made in collaboration with people I encountered online. We explore the intangible boundaries that arbitrate how sexuality should exist on social media. I draw on a personal experience as a content reviewer Youtube, a later involvement in online sex work and being an artist that likes to play with the boundaries of allowed nudity online. I look at what I've learned from sex workers about resistance, hacking, and internet development in relationship to community guidelines applied by algorithms.
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2022
Outside is Scary And inside is lonley, we need a third place Bolit Contemporary Art Center Girona Girona, Spain www.helenaroig.online/project/outside-is-scary “In and out. Transit between public and private space”, the project conceived by the Bòlit Mentor (2021-2022), focuses on the relationship established by students with public space, both physical and digital, and reflects on how it places the individual within a capitalist society that produces a perverted and alienated hierarchy of values, while showing that the norms of coexistence are not up to date in the complex times we live in
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2022
a two way Royal Academy of Art The Hague The Hague, Netherlands www.helenaroig.online/project/a-two-way While asking myself: How could I as a photographer establish a horizontal relationship with the subject I photograph? I spend 4 months helping Moon Baby generate audiovisual material for her OnlyFans porn account. For our last photoshoot together, I booked a hotel room with a bathtub, where we spent two days. This video piece is a performed interview where Moon Baby and I, talk about our own experiences and share our feelings and concerns about power structures within the online sex industry and the documentary approach to sex work. A reflection on the commodification of our bodies, the internet, community rules, censorship, power, stigma, otherness, representation, care, and desire.
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2021
Send the dick back The Hague, Netherlands www.helenaroig.online/project/send-the-dick-back The violent aggressive way western society expresses sexuality is traumatizing for everyone. Send the dick back is a project that invites people to intervene on unsolicited dick pics they receive to send them back to the original creator of the image. The use of humor is employed to expose and bring up this contemporary behavior. In many ways, these acts can be seen as a strategy for online self-defense. I took the first step by sending unsolicited dick pictures I had accumulated on her mailbox and sent them to several artists who sent them back to me again, in digital art piece forms. A game of consent and authorship plays a role in this project. The dick pics were sent to me without my consent so I'm also using them without the consent of the owners of the original images and the dicks. *Authorship is also shared between me and each artist who intervened the dicks, the names and surnames of the artist are written in each image.
International exchanges/Residencies
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2024
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2021
Commissions
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2023Event Photography iii - instrument inventors initiative The Hague, Netherlands Event photography for several activities at iii instrumentinventors.org/post/flipchart-9-photos/ finished
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2023CONFERENCE OF EUROPEAN WATERS BODIES Embacy of the north sea The Hague, Netherlands Currently working on a video documentation of the Embassy of the North sea upcoming conference at mar menor www.embassyofthenorthsea.com/events/european-conference-of-waters/
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2022Event Photography Grey Space in The Middle The Hague, Netherlands Event photographer at The Grey Space in the Middle during 2022 thegreyspace.net/team/ finished
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2022Music Videos for several musicians sonido muchacho Barcelona, Spain Music videos for several Catalan artists from Barcelona during 2022 and 2023 www.helenaroig.online/comission/video finished
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2021Total body workout KABK, The Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague The Hague, Netherlands Photography image and video for Graphic Design department winner work, Total Body workout. howkexin.com/project/total-body-workout.html finished
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2021Don't kiss me Montebello Agency Barcelona, Spain Videolyric for the singer MTINES. This video lyric is a portrait of my hometown L'Estartit, a small toruistic village from La Costa Brava, a territory that became a really popular touristic destination on the 60-70’s. We spent visiting some of those spaces that portray the ???????????????????????????? ???????????????????? that destroyed everything that was there before and shaped this ???????????? ???????? ???????????? ???????????????????? ???????????????? where I spend every summer of my life. www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYoFkZR4Hjk finished
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2021Perpetual Beta Grey Space in The Middle The Hague, Netherlands Documenting the Perpetual Beta exhibition through the role of the screens. www.instagram.com/p/CQ1DfiLK5KW/ finished
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2020Portraits for Calavento Calavento Barcelona, Spain Music Band Portraits www.instagram.com/p/B6sYLp5jcoT/ finished
Publications
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2021SpreadMag Book Self-published, Den Haag SpreadMag Rotterdam, Netherlands www.instagram.com/p/CQQsy75FmfW/ SPREAD MAG. is a young editorial collective to which the curiosity for undiscovered talent is central. The collective is continuously on the lookout for creatives with the right amount of patience to secure their place in the industry. This curiosity manifests itself in a biannual magazine.
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2021Last chance Book badwheather press Helena Roig Girona, Spain badweatherpress.com/product/last-chance/ Publication of my diaries of a road trip to California and Louisiana in 2015.
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2020Balam Magazine Book MigraMigra Balam Buenos aires, Argentina www.instagram.com/p/CMe8aCKroQk/ Balam (“jaguar” in the Mayan language) is an annual magazine and photobook based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, focused primarily on contemporary Latin American photography, with special emphasis on queer artists and the particularities of their regional context.1 23 Originally established as a digital magazine in 2015, it became a print publication from its fifth publication in early 2018 onwards.45 Currently, Balam has had seven issues, three of which were published in printed form.67 The eighth edition of the magazine, titled "Selected Families", was published in 2022
Awards and grants
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2022Photography, Internet and Sex Girona, Spain Research grant
Secondary art-related activities
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2022 - --Advisory board member at 1646 gallery On-going
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2021 - 2021Life-drawing perforer for nice flaps On-going