Mabel Palacín has an art history diploma from the Universitat de Barcelona, where she specialised in film, photography and video. The artistic practice she began in the early 1990s has examined the centrality of images in the contemporary world and our relationship with them, using photos, videos and installations to explore the multiplicity of image formats and how they interfere with the way we see the world. She deploys elements taken from film, advertising and domains of popular culture such as music and graphic design. Her works describe a fragmented reality and are structured by fractured narratives that, like layers, require the viewer’s gaze to be fitted back together. They have a significant spatial dimension; the multiple screens and the centrality of scale produce an architecture of images. For her the space of art is a site for reflection and the proposal of a new status for images.

M. Palacín constructs situations that unfold disparate logics, plunging viewers into a labyrinthine game, like a hall of mirrors, transforming this effect into a key part of the installation. In early pieces like Sur l’autoroute [On the road, 1998–1999] and La distancia correcta [The right distance, 2002–2003, held in the Barcelona MACBA’s permanent collection], both the viewer and the protagonists in these projections cannot distinguish between figure and ground. We realise that to read images we have to look at them with the proper distance, so that we do not mistake their mediation of the world for the world itself. Something similar is suggested by the installation 180°, shown at the 2011 Venice Biennale, where she represented Catalonia and the Balearic Islands with a project curated by David G. Torres – a giant picture of that city made up of multiple photos in such a way as to make it impossible to discern a single point of view or interpretation. In this and other pieces she produces a mysterious mechanism that recalls those at work in films, art and all the artifices of the creation of images in general. Above all, she demonstrates the power of images to mediate and thus impact how we see the world.

Her work has been shown at FRAC Languedoc-Rousillon and the École supérieure des beaux-arts in Montpellier (2014), the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the Barcelona MACBA (1996, 2003, 2016, 2024), amongst other spaces.