Photography is definitely the star of the season, with new exhibitions at Foto Colectania and the Barcelona Photography Archive. Plus, unusual urban narratives at Casa Asia, Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov at MACBA, sculpture and object art by leading 20^th century artists at the Fundació Suñol, and French Romantic painter Eugene Delacroix at Caixaforum. Keep reading for details!

The current exhibition at the CCCB manages to draw a connection between the Sistine Chapel and YouTube. No easy feat, unless you take a moment to contemplate the Sistine Chapel as a gigantic screen. This, after all, is the connective tissue of Pantalla Global (or Global Screen), a look at the power of the screen and its role as one of the main “constituent elements of ultramodern societies”.

The screen has evolved greatly since the first flickering images were projected on a blank canvas more than a century ago. The screen left the cinema and moved into our living rooms and then made the jump to ubiquity. During this expansion, it also radically altered its functions, moving from a source of passive entertainment and artistic expression to a broad range of applications, from news and information to healthcare and surveillance. The screen also shed its passive nature, ushering in an era dominated by tactile and interactive variations.

The Ladder of Escape

As one of the most internationally recognised and celebrated Catalan artists, Joan Miró doesn't need an introduction. Even if you've never been to the foundation on Montjuic that bears his name or seen any of his paintings, you will have encountered his public artworks (the sculpture Dona i ocell at the Parc de Joan Miró on Carrer Tarragona, for example) or come across reproductions of his work on everything from calendars to ceramic plates. The exhibition The Ladder of Escape (L'escala de l'evasio) currently showing at the Fundació Joan Miró is the most important show dedicated to his work in the last twenty years. Before coming to Barcelona, the exhibition was at the Tate Modern in London, one of the organisers along with the Fundació Joan Miró, where it triumphed as the sixth most visited temporary exhibition in the museum's history.

Culturally speaking, autumn in Barcelona usually means intense film festival activity and the inauguration of new exhibitions at the city's major museums. This year there seems to be a little cross-pollination going on. There is a clear cinematic presence in the art films about the siege of Sarajevo in 1395 Days Without Red or the video correspondence between filmmakers making up The Complete Letters. The Mexican Suitcase, the first exhibition in Spain of the "lost images" of Capa, Chim and Taro, also revolves around the narrative power of the photographic image. Finally, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes might not have a filmic connection, but Diaghilev knew more about creative cross-pollination than most, transforming his ballet company into an astonishing expression of multidisciplinary art.

The Mexican Suitcase

The "lost images" of Robert Capa, David "Chim" Seymour and Gerda Taro are at the heart of a great international mystery story. After covering the Spanish Civil War alongside David Seymour and Gerda Taro, and with WWII breaking out, Capa fled Europe in 1939. His colleague Tchiki Weiss rescued three boxes with 4500 negatives from Capa's studio in Paris. And then, amidst the madness of war...they vanished without a trace.