Image: El Apartamento, La Habana
José Bedia’s ‘Diálogos en el desierto’ opens on 10 September at the Main Room, El Apartamento, Madrid, and remains on view through 7 November 2026. An opening event is scheduled for Wednesday, 10 September, from 12pm to 10pm.
The exhibition brings together two distinct groups of works under one title. One comprises works made on traditional textiles from West Africa, specifically Mali. He describes this body of work as a tribute to anonymous people who have maintained a craft tradition, which he has sought to interweave with his usual iconography.
In his exploration of textile supports, Bedia also incorporated jute, which he describes as closely connected to Afro-Cuban traditions, specifically those related to Babalu Ayé. He also illustrated several patakíes, or mythological “instructive” passages from Cuban cultural heritage.
The second group consists of narrow, horizontally elongated canvases that Bedia describes as evoking a dreamlike or mental landscape, in which sky and earth converge in vague and diffuse encounters. The paintings include figures of men, animals and statues that observe one another, communicate or move from one point to another. Bedia writes that these figures suggest the absence of a preamble, or of something no longer present in the work.
The artist states that the paintings can function either as individual works or as a larger descriptive unit, with some capable of connecting to one another. His account identifies humans conversing with animals, deities appearing in tangible form and the ruins of gods appearing to a traveller in an unknown wasteland. The dialogues of the exhibition’s title, he writes, may be brief or infinite, involving an interlocutor who seems deaf or mute, yet attentive.
A separate exhibition, Brenda Cabrera’s ‘La pesca’, runs from 10 September to 7 November 2026 in the Project Room, El Apartamento, Madrid. Its text describes scenes unfolding in an ocean beyond recognisable geography. Water is presented as evoking a primordial sea, a site in which the boundaries between forms remained open and the possibility of continual transformation persists.
Extended hours for Apertura Madrid 2026 are scheduled for 11 and 12 September, from 11am to 8pm, and 13 September, from 11am to 2pm.
