Handfuls of International Dust

Nomads, an installation by Xavier Ribas, belonging to the Per Amor a l’Art Collection, has been in Paris, London, California, Vancouver and Toronto as part of the exhibition “A Handful of Dust”. The National Center of Photography and Images in Taiwan will be his last stop before returning to Valencia.
The work Nomads, (2008) a polyptych made up of 35 pieces by the artist Xavier Ribas has been travelling the world since 2015 as part of the exhibition A Handful of Dust, a project by the curator David Campany that proposes a speculative history of the 20th century through “images of dust” such as destruction in times of war, natural catastrophes, domestic rubbish and also forensic art, as well as abstraction and conceptual art.
In November 2021 it will return home to the Bombas Gens art centre of the Fundació Per Amor a l’Art, which has, as one of its main objectives, to share its collections with institutions all over the world.

Nomads consists of 33 black and white photographs, 2 colour photographs, a text and a print on photographic paper of an image extracted from Google, making up a polyptych of great visual strength.

Xavier Ribas is a lecturer at the University of Brighton (England) and lecturer on the MA in Photography, Art and Technique at the Universitat Politècnica de València. His photographic work investigates places and histories and geographies of abandonment. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions and his work forms part of institutional collections such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the MACBA in Barcelona and the Fotocollective Universiteit in Leiden. He has received awards, commissions and grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (2012-16 and 2017-18), the International Photography Research Network (2006), the Commande Publique du Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/Centre National des Arts Plastiques (2006) and the Université de Toulouse II-Le Mirail (2007-2008), among others.
A Handful of Dust began its tour at Le Bal, Paris (16 October 2015 – 31 January 2016), the work continued to travel to Whitechapel Gallery, London (7 June 2017 – 3 September 2017), California Museum of Photography, California (7 July 2018 – 9 December 2018), The Pollygon Gallery, Vancouver (8 February 2019 – 28 April 2019) and Ryerson Image Center, Toronto (22 January 2020 – 05 April 2020).

Curated by David Campany and with the aim of showing a visual journey through some of the unusual imagery of the 20th century, the exhibition includes works by 30 artists and photographers such as John Divola, Marcel Duchamp, Walker Evans, Mona Kuhn, Man Ray, Gerhard Richter, Sophie Ristelhueber, Aaron Siskind, Shomei Tomatsu, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington.