Loop Barcelona 2025 programme has been revealed inclyding insights into Loop Fair, Loop Festival and Loop Symposium with Artistic Direction by Filipa Ramos.
Founded in 2003 as the first fair and festival dedicated to artists’ films, Loop is an annual event held in Barcelona that gives an outstanding contribution to the development, consolidation and widespread of artists’ experiments with moving images.
Loop Festival is a 10-day event of exhibitions, talks, performances and encounters attesting the importance of artist’s video and cinema, spread out across the cultural and artistic venues of the city. The 2025 edition of Loop Festival Miratges Mirages, under the Artistic Direction of Filipa Ramos with curatorial assistance from Eva Paià, has mirages as its central theme. The festival explores how moving images — exactly like mirages — create fleeting yet powerful visions that inspire imagination, desire, forms of projection halfway between imagination and reality. In dialogue with multiple artistic and cultural institutions across Barcelona, the festival presents a program of films, installations, and gatherings that
seek to unfold ideas around technology, ecology, and identity, celebrating the unique ability of artists’ cinema to interact with and reflect on the present-future. Through exhibitions and events across the city, the festival highlights the artistic and emotional potential of the mirage to generate both illusion and hope.
Out of the many proposals of Loop Festival’s program of exhibitions, live performances, talks and activities: the exhibition To the Wind at Casa Elizalde, a reflection on the links between translation and censorship by artist Mar Reykjavik; the screening of Billy Roisz’s film Garden of Electric Delights curated by Júlia Polo at Casa Seat, on the themes of interferences and materiality in film; On Lines, the first live audiovisual collaboration between Iraqi experimental musician Dania Shihab and Chilean filmmaker Carlos Vásquez Méndez, who will explore the concept of the line as a boundary and threshold at CCCB, in collaboration with the L’Alternativa Festival; Trùng mù – Endless, sightless, a screening and conversation with artist Phuong Linh Nguyen at MACBA, in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation; a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Ana Vaz curated by einaidea at Museu de la Música, which will showcase career-defining works of her research about the trajectories of historic and contemporary colonialism and the co-existence of human and non-human forms; a Joan Jonas exhibition at Museu Picasso, drawing a line between the legacy of the two artists, united by their political commitment and idea of art as a tool of resistance; the screening of Albert Serra’s film at Museu Tàpies – Fe sense obres morta és, which delves into one of the most emotional and surprising aspects of Antoni Tàpies’ universe (and many more).
Loop Fair which runs alongside, features a carefully curated selection of video artworks presented by a group of local, national and international art galleries. These galleries are invited by an international committee of collectors who every year ensure a diverse, innovative and high-quality showcase. Loop Fair is held in the Almanac Hotel, in central Barcelona. Galleries include: Galerie Alain Gutharc (Paris), Alexander Levy (Berlin), Analix Forever (Chêne-Bourg), àngels (Barcelona), Galerie Anne Barrault (Paris), Galerie Anne-Sarah Bénichou (Paris), Barbara Thumm (Berlin), Berg Contemporary (Reykjavík), Chi-Wen (Taipei), Dialogue Gallery (Lisbon), Eins Gallery (Limassol), Esther Schipper (Berlin, Paris, Seoul), Francisco Fino (Lisbon), Fuga (Barcelona), House of Chappaz (Barcelona), Ingahee Gallery (Seoul), Joey Ramone (Rotterdam), Jorge López Galería (Valencia), Josilda da Conceição Gallery (Amsterdam) LAVERÓNICA (Modica), Meno Parkas Gallery (Kaunas), Galerie Molitor (Berlin), Ncontemporary (Milan, Venezia), Nika Project Space (Dubai, Paris), Galerie Philippe Bober (Berlin), Pierre-François Ouellette
(Montreal), Project Fulfill Art Space (Taipei), Proyectos Ultravioleta (Guatemala), RocioSantaCruz (Barcelona), ROLF ART (Buenos Aires), SAC Gallery (Bangkok), Galería Senda (Barcelona), Suburbia Contemporary (Barcelona, Leipzig), THE RYDER (Madrid), TICK TACK (Antwerp), Torch Gallery (Amsterdam), VIDEOART AT MIDNIGHT (Berlin), Gallery Where (Beijing), Galerie Zink (Waldkirchen).
Embracing the idea of the mirage as a vision and projection, the Loop Symposium envisages the future of moving images through various panels that place Loop at the forefront of the debate on the conceptual and practical reality of artists’ cinema. In 2024, the Symposium Images that Move Us Forward. Commissioning, Producing, Exhibiting and Collecting Artists’ Cinema, brought top experts from institutional backgrounds who shared their knowledge and experience and ways of working and caring for moving images. For 2025, the Symposium will bring together visionary minds, inviting them to share concrete proposals, reflections and suggestions that contribute to draft what can be changed, improved and transformed within the various areas of artists’ cinema, and to help imagine how the various entities that are part of the circuit can collaborate, better work together and support one another.
This programme will include Collecting as a Form of Caring — On the importance of collecting and supporting artists’ cinema Care has been a term that has been used and abused in recent years, yet it is more than a simple trendy word. It is a call for a transformation in the ways curators, institutions, artists
and collectors relate to one another and to the artworks at the core of their relationships. To care is not only to be attentive and considerate about what happens now but also to anticipate and create the conditions for the dynamics between people, spaces and artworks to evolve and support one another. Inspired by politics and forms of advocacy for care, Collecting as a Form of Caring, the opening session of this year’s edition of Loop Festival, focuses on how collecting moving-image artworks—films, videos and installations—can act as a manifesto for the preservation, advocacy and attention required by formats and supports that need special dedication.
Virtual Trust — On digital circulation, authorship and ownership In a famous essay from 2009, artist Hito Steyerl made a claim for the “defense of poor images,” artworks that had been converted to a lower resolution in order to be easily circulated digitally. More than 15 years later, her assessment of the fundamental relationship between the creation and distribution of images and the digital realm remains even pertinent. By providing materials, technologies, networks and related systems of production, archiving, circulation and communication, the digital realm has radically changed the context of artists’
cinema. The panel will explore new frameworks for licensing, streaming and protecting artists’ rights, while considering how digital distribution can expand audiences and reinvent notions of value and authorship.
Ons and Offs — On the unique role of biennales and festivals to incentivise artists’ cinema Biennales and film festivals have been the main, first and sometimes only spaces where artists’ films are presented in optimal viewing settings and provided with the conditions needed for the adequate commission, production and exhibition of technically complex and often costly works. They have also been the sole spaces in which these artworks reach wider publics rather than peers and specialist audiences, thus dialoguing with fundamental social, political and aesthetic stances. During Ons and Offs, exhibition curators, artists and producers reflect on the recent history of large-scale art and film events, considering their important role in stimulating the creation of new works, ensuring their sustained exhibition and providing critical visibility.
Loop Barceloana 2025 Miratges Mirages under the Artistic Direction of Filipa Ramos @loopbarcelona
FESTIVAL: 12th – 22nd November 2025 @loopbarcelona_festival
FAIR: 18th – 20th November 2025
SYMPOSIUM: 19th – 20th November 2025
About
Filipa Ramos, PhD, is Lecturer at the Arts Institute of the HGK/FHNW, Basel. Her research focuses on how contemporary art engages with nature and ecology. Ramos has been curator of the Art Basel Film sector (2020-24) and co-founded the online artists’ cinema Vdrome. Current projects include BESTIARI ,the Catalan representation at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2024) and the festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (since 2018, with Lucia Pietroiusti). In 2024, she curated Songs for the Changing Seasons, 1. Klima Biennale Wien and in 2022, Persons Personen, 8th
Biennale Gherdëina (both w/ Lucia Pietroiusti). In 2021, she co-curated Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale.
Loop Barcelona is a platform dedicated to the study and promotion of the moving image. Since its creation in 2003, it offers a specialized audience a curated selection of film programs. While teaming up with an international community of artists, curators, gallerists, collectors and institution directors, it yearly hosts Loop Fair, Loop Festival and Loop Symposium: three special meeting points that unfold in the city of Barcelona. Respectively, Loop Fair is a selection of contemporary artists films presented by
international galleries in a unique viewing experience; Loop Festival, a series of proposals related with moving image creation in the form of exhibitions, screenings and live performances in collaboration with arts centers, museums, institutions around the city; and Loop Symposium, a think-thank where art professionals are called to discuss the present and future of artists’ films.
Throughout the year, Loop undertakes projects that develop in collaboration with leading international agents and materialize in different formats and locations, from commissions to touring exhibitions in leading venues, conferences and film programmes, among others. Loop’s interest in video steers in the direction of providing visibility, encouraging encounters, producing knowledge and works, and supporting the market. Furthermore, it has been the driving force behind the construction of our video collection, enriched yearly through selected works presented at Loop Fair, that constitute a shared collection with the MACBA Foundation.
