From 20 February to 23 May 2021, Fabra i Coats: Contemporary Art Centre of Barcelona hosted The Late Estate Broomberg & Chanarin, a posthumous show where Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin announce to the world that they had decided to “die”. In December 2020, two days before the United Kingdom closed its borders, a 13-metre-long articulated truck left London for Barcelona. The truck was packed with wooden crates loaded with every piece of work produced by the artists Broomberg & Chanarin, as well as their unprinted negatives, contact prints, intimate notes and sketches of unrealised projects.
After twenty-three years of collaboration, the duo has legally, economically, creatively and conceptually committed suicide. Their last will and testament was opened and read aloud on 20 February at Fabra i Coats, alongside a display of their estate, which was exhibited gradually over the 3-month exhibition in the presence of an archivist, who publicly appraised the estate inside the gallery halls.
This is the first posthumous retrospective of their much celebrated career, the end of an important collaboration, but without nostalgia. With their “death”, they question authorship, memory and heritage as closed concepts. That is why this exhibition traces and continues the “exquisite corpse” of their trajectory.
Curated by Joanna Hurtado MATHEU
A full obituary by Sean O’Tool was published in the British Journal of Photography to commemorate the timely death of their collaboration.
