Instant Flashes, Urban Traces
Opening: Saturday, July 5, at 7:00 PM
Official re-opening: Monday, July 21, at 7:30 PM (as part of the Experimental Photo Festival 2025)
Finissage: Sunday, July 27, at 5:30 PM
Venue: BienCuadrado Gallery, Carrer d’Ataülf 14, Ciutat Vella, Barcelona
Curated by: Andrés Aguilar Caro
Organized in collaboration with: Experimental Photo Festival 2025
In the heart of Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, Instant Flashes, Urban Traces opens as an exhibition that dissolves the boundaries between the instantaneous and the urban, the photographic and the performative. Curated by Andrés Aguilar Caro, the show is part of the Experimental Photo Festival 2025, one of the most vibrant international events
focused on non-conventional photography.
This proposal arises as a provocation: can art free itself from the frameworks imposed by tradition? Can the ephemeral claim its place in visual memory? Through a selection of works by international artists, Instant Flashes, Urban Traces explores the intersection between instant photography —no retouching, no second chances— and
street art, which is born and vanishes without asking permission. The aim is not to offer answers, but to provoke questions in every visitor.
The exhibition, which officially opens on July 5 at BienCuadrado gallery, will have a key reactivation on July 21 with a special reopening during the festival. The finissage will take place on July 27, closing a month in which the city will bear witness to an exciting visual experimentation. In this show, authenticity is not imposed — it is dismantled, shaken, and reconstructed through the gaze of each artist and each spectator.
Andrés Aguilar Caro
Photographer and editor, Andrés began his career in photojournalism before turning to instant photography as an intimate and artistic language. In 2013 he founded Instant Photographers, a platform that supports photographers working with the instant format, placing art and personal imagery at the center.
AshWan
A British artist and gallerist based in Barcelona, AshWan blends hip-hop energy with fine arts techniques, transforming discarded materials into works that celebrate urban culture and its history. He currently directs BienCuadrado gallery, focused on contemporary art with a social and urban approach.
Artists
Cromwell Schubarth (USA)
The photographer presents Gnarly, a series of yellow duochrome polaroids that document and abstract the sculpture Unzipped. Displayed as a frameless mosaic, the photos evoke a street art aesthetic and question how the perception of art changes when removed from its original context.
Jennifer Rumbach (Germany)
From Cologne, Jennifer Rumbach presents two images that contrast the urban everyday with the industrial and rural: one shows a typical kiosk with a local character; the other, a naked woman walking toward power plants. Her works delve into the tension between freedom and social structures.
Erin O’Leary (USA/Germany)
With No Borders, Erin O’Leary creates a layering of polaroid transparencies over a collage of instant images, fusing photographs of graffiti, construction, and political street art. Her work reflects on borders —physical and ideological— in a city in constant transformation.
Gabi Torres (Venezuela/Spain)
The visual artist and photographer transforms her polaroids into contemporary pieces. She presents two works: an immersive installation with projection, suspended cutouts, and recycled textures, and a pictorial intervention on polaroid that combines symmetry, volume, and visual architecture.
Paolo DellaCiana (Italy)
In Nocturnal Veins, the artist transforms nighttime polaroids of Florence into a diptych on watercolor paper, intervened with spray paint, dripping, and urban calligraphy. The work investigates the visual identity of nocturnal urban space and creates a fluid dialogue between photography and painting.
Andrea Cassady (Venezuela/Spain)
Andrea presents two black-and-white polaroids from her series on fetishism and kink. In this capsule dedicated to Pup Play, the artist explores how play and power dynamics prevail over the sexual, revealing primal instincts that override everyday concerns.
Mila Nijinsky (France)
Amid urban rubble and fragments of light, Mila Nijinsky constructs an intimate altar where the sacred reveals itself in the forgotten. Concrete Ritual emerges from her walks through various cities, capturing fleeting instants that become visual ceremonies.
Polaroscope (Spain)
The artist presents two works that address the passage of time. Palimpsest overlays industrial materials onto the image. In This Corrosion, an embedded hourglass symbolizes the erosion of the instant. Both pieces engage with the city as a living surface between memory and transformation.
Natalia Romay (Argentina/Spain)
Lisbon, outside. Lisbon, inside reinterprets the city through Lisbon’s tiles. The artist creates a visual puzzle where the historical and the contemporary merge, evoking a city that oscillates between the real and the imagined. It reflects the duality that defines many European metropolises and that so often shapes us.
Felicita Russo (Italy)
In ICONOID, Felicita Russo explores the boundary between reality and imagination using the polaroid frame as a threshold among them: it becomes a portal to dreamlike worlds. The image emerges from her own technique of light painting with a fiber-optic brush and colored flashlights.
Anika Neese (Germany)
From polaroid fragments, Socialist Panel Building, Deconstruction reconstructs and deconstructs a socialist panel building in Berlin. The architectural order is dismantled and recomposed in a visual play between the rigidity of the past and the creation of new meanings.
Alex Mehiel (USA)
The artist presents three images that approach the unpredictable beauty of analog imperfection. The polaroids, incubated in the humid climate of Puerto Viejo, were altered by fungi that transformed the images into dreamlike visions: figures suspended in light and color like visual echoes of an almost vanished presence.
Clare Marie Bailey (Wales)
The work The Haunting of the Self in Time reflects on the dynamism of identity in urban spaces. Figures appear blurred or ghostlike, becoming traces of a self that simultaneously inhabits and abandons the place, questioning how we slip between the fleeting present and the marks we leave behind.
* The official poster of Instant Flashes, Urban Traces was created in collaboration between photographer and editor Andrés Aguilar Caro, founder of Instant Photographers, and urban artist AshWan, director of the BienCuadrado gallery. The resulting image captures the spirit of the exhibition: a free fusion between instant photography and the raw energy