Dr Laura Vallés-Vílchez
- Senior Tutor (Research)
- Curating Contemporary Art MA
Laura works across curating, publishing and pedagogy, developing situated forms of knowledge through long-term collaboration, experimental display and an ethics of collective attention.
Laura was UK Creative Director of 4Cs: From Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture, developing exhibitions, film programmes, seminars and workshops, and Co-director of Articulacions - IVAM UPV UV Study Programme, connecting pedagogical and museum practices. Laura is a founding member of the publishing house Concreta, dedicated to contemporary art and theory. Recent curatorial projects include Marisol: When Things Are Just Beginning (Centro Botín–MAC/CCB), Teresa Lanceta: Weaving as an Open Source (MACBA–IVAM) and Larruak eta izurrak (Tabakalera). She directed two biennials: Myths of the Near Future at TEA, Canary Islands, and Rumour of a Rift at Pueblo Museo [Museum Village], Genalguacil, and has lectured at the China Academy of Art, Royal Academy of Arts, SOAS and New York University.
Gallery
More information
Research interests
Laura’s curatorial research asks what it means to edit, to tell stories and to care when attention, bodies and knowledge have themselves become resources to be administered, accelerated and exhausted. Editing operates upon the conditions of visibility, storytelling exceeds representation, and care emerges not as kindness or repair, but as a material question. From the friction between these practices—editing, storytelling, caring—curatela emerges.
Developed through Laura’s practice-led PhD (RCA, 2022), curatela names a shifting territory between institutional structures and situated forms of knowledge. Initially grounded in the post-Francoist Spanish context, it refuses the exhibition as the only privileged site of curatorial work, extending curatorial practice across islands, villages, classrooms and sustained relationships with artists and other constituents.
Her current research extends curatela towards an unhurried politics of attention. Against cultures of acceleration, extraction and institutional exhaustion, she asks how curatorial and pedagogical practices might sustain trust, complexity and collective forms of knowledge amid social, political and ecological instability.
Practice
Laura’s practice responds to a present marked by fractured histories, political instability and increasingly exhausted cultural institutions. Working through exhibitions, books, film and collective situations, she asks how art can remain a space for encounter and disagreement, and how different histories and forms of experience might be brought into proximity without being reconciled or made equivalent.
Her work is often built through long-term exchanges with artists, writers and other cultural practitioners. Rather than producing projects as isolated events, these relationships generate exhibitions, publications and public programmes that change form across different contexts. Publishing, particularly through Concreta, remains central to this work: a space for translation, circulation and the construction of new intellectual and political affinities.
Research funding
Laura’s research has been supported by a Botín Foundation Grant for Curatorial Studies (2016–18).
Other awards and professional recognition include Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA, 2024), SoAH RCA PhD (2022), Komisario Berriak (2019) and Leonardo da Vinci (2007).
Publications, exhibitions and other outcomes
Contributing editor — selection
Vallés Vilchez, L. Marisol: When Things Are Just Beginning: Drawings 1949–2016. Madrid: La Fábrica, 2026. Curator, editor and contributing author. Exhibition: Centro Botín, Santander; MAC/CCB, Lisbon, 2026–27.
Preciado, P. B., A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time. Bilbao: Azkuna Zentroa, 2022. Editor.
Valles Vilchez, Laura and Enguita, Nuria, (eds.) Teresa Lanceta. Weaving as Open Source. MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and IVAM Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Barcelona, 2022.
Vallés Vilchez, L. Myths of the Near Future. Tenerife: TEA, 2022. Editor and Biennial Artistic Director.
Thiel, T., Hoste, A. and Enguita, N., Anna Boghiguian: A Short Long History. Sometimes Unexpectedly the Present Meets the Past. Berlin: Koenig Books, 2022. Editor.
Vallés Vilchez, L. Across the sand. Madrid : CentroCentro, 2020. Curator and editor.
Contributing writer — selection
‘How Can an Unhurried Politics of Attention Reshape Curatorial Pedagogies’, in Intermission: Curatorial Studies/Education? Hangzhou: Institute of Contemporary Art and Social Thoughts, CAA. 2026.
‘Bailar la herida: fracturas, memoria y descolonización’, in Miguel Ángel Baixauli (ed.), Mundos por venir. Fragmentos de un texto futuro. Valencia: La documental edicions / Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València, 2025.
‘On the Weeds and Words of Carla Filipe’, in In My Own Language I am Independente. Porto: Fundação de Serralves, 2023.
‘Postnatural Independent Program (PIP): Modes of Border Dwelling’, e-flux Education, 07/23, 2023.
‘Outside Witness: On the Historical Reception of the Potosí Principle’, The Principio Potosí Archive. Berlin: Koenig Books, 2022.
A story within a story - A world of many worlds In: Gavaldon, Sabel, Khalil, Adam and Sweitzer, Bayley, (eds.) Nosferasta: The book:. Gasworks, London, UK.
‘Archiving Voices: Collection and Collaboration in Spanish Contemporary Art’, Photographies Journal, Routledge, 2020.
‘Between Modernity and Tradition’, Camera Austria, 141, 2018.
‘Gently Revealing, Caring Hard, All Touching’, Anarchivo Sida. San Sebastián: Tabakalera, 2017.
‘Somewhere Between Art and the World’, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 2014.
Translator — selection
Stengers, I., Building Hope on the Edge of the Abyss. Atelier Graphoui, 2023.
Preciado, P. B., A Voice for Erauso. Epilogue for a Trans Time. Bilbao: Azkuna Zentroa, 2022.
Davey, M., Quema los diarios. Valencia: Concreta, 2020.
Terranova, F., Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival [film]. Atelier Graphoui, 2017.
Film and other outcomes
Vallés Vílchez, L., Voices in the Forest: An Act of Editing. Film, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona, 2023.