Permanent Red, John Berger

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Image courtesy of Ajuntament Barcelona

John Berger (Hackney, London, 1926-Paris, 2017) was a key figure among those authors who, in the mid-20th century, questioned formalist interpretations of how images should be read from a contemporary perspective. 

So, despite producing emblematic texts in practically all fields of writing, including poetry, plays, novels, essays and film and television scripts, what stands out in Berger’s case are his ways of telling and seeing, which restore the ideological, moral and aesthetic implications of each story or image. And he does so without getting caught up in academic verbiage or in the metalanguage of theory.

Permanent Red is an exhibition named after the book of the same name, published in 1960, which brings together some of Berger’s art critiques for the Marxist magazine New Statesman, with which he collaborated for more than a decade. These writings, well-known at the time, offered scathing readings targeted against bourgeois taste—the title itself is a provocation in this sense—and presented unknown or minority artists, anti-canonical works and analyses that disagreed with conservative historiography.

The exhibition, one of the most comprehensive ones to date, focuses on the political nature of Berger’s career and his collaborations with photographers like Jean Mohr, filmmakers such as Mike Dibb and Alain Tanner, playwrights like Simon McBurney, and poets such as Mahmud Darwish. In addition, previously unseen drawings and documentary materials, in a museographical sense, are exhibited.

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