Young talent at Espai Nivi

Professional boost for young talent: Espai Nivi and the UPV turn “Every creation is a question” into a platform for artistic launching.

February 6 to March 8, 2026.

The Espai Nivi Gallery is hosting these days the exhibition “Every creation is a question”, a project that consolidates as a real launching pad for the students of the Master in Artistic Production and the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), as a result of the collaboration agreement signed between the Gallery and the Center two years ago. This initiative, which is now in its second consecutive year and will be continued through the PAM!26 call, rewards young artists from the Master’s program by offering them a first professional platform from which to make the leap into the network of the artistic and cultural market of the Valencian Community.

Curated by UPV professors and researchers Alejandro Mañas García and Laura Silvestre García, the show brings together the works of Álex Jover, Diana Quintana, Marcos Boluda, Mateo Méndez, Arturo Sánchez and Celia Fillol de Miguel, young creators trained at the Valencian public university and linked to the Master in Artistic Production. As the curators point out in the curatorial text, naming this exhibition Every Creation is a Question is to assume that contemporary art “is not legitimized by the answers it offers, but by the intensity of the doubts it is capable of sustaining” in an era in a hurry to close any question.

The exhibition was born as a development of the Espai Nivi award within the PAM! platform, which each year makes visible the artistic research of the Faculty of Fine Arts, and embodies the spirit of the agreement signed with the UPV: to accompany the passage from the classroom to the gallery and make the university stop being a bubble to become a laboratory open to the environment. In this edition, the opening on February 6 was preceded by the visit of two buses of students from the master’s program, who traveled to the gallery accompanied by professors from the program to learn first-hand about the space and the operation of a professional exhibition project.

The proposals of the six artists trace a path that goes from the dissident body to intimate rituals, from domestic time to memories in transit, articulating a material landscape made of fabrics, ash, sugar, clay, bioplastics, ceramic supports, brass, digital photography and silkscreen printing. As Mañas and Silvestre develop, each piece is posed as an open question: about the body and marginal materials in Todo lo vivo se mueve (Álex Jover), about the remains of the sacred in En llamas, Mis reliquias and Umbral (Diana Quintana), about fragility and the right to stop in aquí en remanso sostendré mis preguntas (Marcos Boluda), on immaterial memory and fragmentary stories in Clear lei ski (Mateo Méndez), on domestic routine and female genealogy in Todos los días de la semana (Celia Fillol de Miguel), and on displacement, error and gesture as trace in Oda al índice and Oda al proceso (Arturo Sánchez).

Rather than celebrating “finished works”, Every Creation is a Question emphasizes creation as a process, as situated knowledge that opens up to the other in the form of aesthetic experience. Many of the pieces behave like open organisms or landscapes that transform over time, surfaces that register doubt, correction and insistence, reminding us that all creation implies exposing oneself and sustaining fragility as part of the path. In the words of the curatorial text, the exhibition is proposed as “a backwater in the current” of the liquid modernity described by Zygmunt Bauman, a space of slowing down where contemplation recovers a political dimension in the face of acceleration and the immediate consumption of images.

The human and educational dimension of the project is key: the exhibition allows young artists to come into direct contact with an independent gallery, rehearse professional dynamics of production and assembly, and begin to weave networks with other cultural agents in the city. At the same time, it makes visible to the general public the intense work carried out in the Master in Artistic Production of the UPV, showing how university artistic research translates into works capable of questioning the public and providing critical thinking to the Valencian cultural fabric.

In Espai Nivi, the visitor finds a careful and close space where each work functions as an invitation to look differently at what we think we know: the body itself, the house, the family memory, the shared symbols or the migratory trajectories that cross biographies and territories. Rather than offering slogans or closed answers, the exhibition aspires that each person leaves with one or several questions of their own, perhaps small but persistent, that accompany them beyond the room: how do we want to inhabit instability, what deserves to be taken care of, what can still affect us.