Pablo´s Birthday: Gala Knörr

´Party is Over, Long Live the Party´ was inspired by Gala Knörr’s own experience attending raves in the UK. The project originated from her video work ALLODOXAPHOBIA, which explored the memetic potential of the People’s Vote March in London in October 2019. At the end of the march, she encountered an impromptu anti-Brexit rave in Trafalgar Square—an experience that sparked her fascination with the distinctive ways people engage in protest. Knörr connected the similarities between this event and the Freedom To Party march at the square in January 1990, where almost 10,000 people danced against the Graham Bright Bill that would outlaw rave parties. These two simple acts of dissent synthesize the connection between protest as an expression of joy and joy as a radical weapon of transformative protest, forging a link between the act of demonstration and the act of celebration.

Through November 9 at Pablo´s Birthday, New York.

Gala Knörr

Gala Knörr (1984, Vitoria-Gasteiz) is a visual artist and researcher at EHU/UPV, a graduate of Parsons Paris (BFA Fine Arts) and Central Saint Martins (MA Fine Art), she has also studied at Richmond University, complementing her training with workshops and classes led by Txomin Badiola, Richard Linklater and Pedro G. Romero. Knörr mainly uses painting to reflect on the power of images and their impact on our collective consciousness. Starting from the pictorial, she has also worked with video, performance and writing to explore issues related to popular culture and the construction of shared histories.

Her work has been exhibited in various museums and galleries internationally, including Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao); DA2 (Salamanca); CentroCentro (Madrid); La Casa Encendida (Madrid); Le Port de Créateurs (Toulon); Raum MG16 (Cologne); Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz); SB34 (Brussels); La Térmica (Málaga); Fabra i Coats (Barcelona); Moisés Pérez de Albeniz (Madrid); Galeria Mayoral (Barcelona) etc. She has done residencies at Morpho (Antwerp), C3A (Córdoba), The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum (New York), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Centre for Postcolonial Studies at Goldsmiths University (London) and AIRwro (Wrocław) among others.

Knörr has given lectures and has directed workshops at the Faculty of Arts at the UGR (Granada), Faculty of Arts at the EHU/UPV (Vitoria-Gasteiz), Faculty of Arts at the Universidad de Murcia (Murcia), CENDEAC (Murcia), Can Felipa (Barcelona), Zas Espazioa (Vitoria-Gasteiz) and Saatchi Gallery (London).