L'era atòmica

Photography exhibition in Barcelona tracing how the atomic age, begun with the first nuclear test of 1945, has shaped art, science and politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

This photography exhibition is built around a central idea: the atomic age has not ended. Its starting point is the first nuclear test, carried out in 1945 in the desert of New Mexico, whose effect on the planet's life extends over a timescale that is hard to pin down. Through twentieth- and twenty-first-century art, the route examines this new experience of time and its links with science, politics and culture.

The works present the artists' responses to scientific change: from 1890, when physics demonstrated that the atom is not the ultimate component of matter, to the United States' use of the bomb against Japan. Some combine science and occultism, others dispense with representation in order to make the imperceptible perceptible, and others reflect the critique that, from the 1970s onwards, ecology, feminism, anti-colonialism and the counterculture levelled against civil and military nuclear energy. The exhibition also addresses the accidents at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011.

The exhibition devotes a space to Spain's nuclear history, from the construction of the first power plants under Franco to current debates about the nuclear phase-out. The route also covers the difficult management of radioactive waste and the new rearmament policies, challenges that define the contemporary atomic age.