Claudia Pagès Rabal: ALJUB

Claudia Pagès Rabal creates scenarios where multiple layers, dialogues and choreography define new possibilities for art. Her video installations offer a special physicality observing social and economic realities: focusing on identity, infrastructures, and history but also relationships, social codes and heritage. The concept of time in her work is that of a condensed one, presenting performative situations in real time while embracing centuries of history.

The exhibition ALJUB is the first presentation of Claudia Pagès Rabal in the Nordic Countries. “Aljub” is a peculiar word, Arabic in origin and not commonly used in Pagès Rabal’s native Catalan. It translates to cistern, a tank for storing water, which becomes both an idea and a real object defining the exhibition. Pagès Rabal’s video installation Aljubs i Grups was co-produced with Index when it was first shown at the European Nomadic Biennial Manifesta15 in Barcelona, and it now anchors her exhibition in Stockholm.

In Aljubs i Grups we are surrounded by a layered history inside an 11th century Moorish cistern in Xàtiva, near the city of Valencia, built to supply water to an Islamic palace which was later destroyed to build a convent, and it’s now in the grounds of a luxury hotel. The water cistern is strewn with markings, a composite of legal contracts and lewd graffiti, all imbued with desire for permanency. Following her first encounter with the cistern – and swimming in its green waters – , the artist localized other reservoirs and ruins in the same area. Their original function is lost; these vessels now hold alternative uses. Fresh graffiti in a dried-out cistern indicates its contemporary function as a countercultural gathering place. The cistern walls offer themselves for traces of bravery or discomfort. These cisterns and old constructions become containers for time.

Pagès Rabal transforms these places into choreographic sites where bodies are in dialogue with history, exploring joy, politics and the construction of language. The artist invited three performers to interact with the sites, becoming the narrative bodies for a scripted dialogue, flowing from music to spoken word, happiness and political analysis, identity questioning and appropriation of traditional movements. The resulting video work is presented in a curved led screen installation, including the visitor in a complex choreography with the work’s physicality in the exhibition space.

The exhibition also presents many processual documents (the screenplay, small production drawings and paintings on handmade paper) showing the complexity of the interactions and decisions leading up to the finished piece. In the cinematography notes, we see how the gaze of Pagès Rabal’s camera is understood as a choreographed body and appears early in the process of definition of the work: the cameras are part of a general choreographic movement becoming active agents and bodies in action. With this gesture, the transferred image becomes part of a physical interaction between performers and includes the spectators when the work is presented to the public.

Claudia Pagès Rabal (b.1990) works and lives in Barcelona. Pagès Rabal has been shown in exhibitions such as Five Defence Towers, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2025; Manifesta 15, Barcelona, 2024; Scene I. Making landscape, IVAM, Valencia, 2024; Typo-Topo-Time Aljibe, Sculpture Center, New York, 2023; Uno, CA2M, Madrid, 2023; Banditry, Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, 2023; Gerundi Circular, Tabakalera, Donostia, 2022; Some of It Falls from the Belt and Lands on the Walkway Beside the Conveyor, Vleeshal, Middelburg, 2022; Panorama, MACBA, Barcelona, 2022; Rats and Roaches, CAPC, Bordeaux, 2022; and The Living House, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Braunschweig, 2021. After her exhibition at Index, Claudia Pagès Rabal’s work will be shown at Istambul Biennial, MUMOK (Vienna) and La Biennale di Venezia (2026).

Index would like to thank TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and Institut Ramon Llull for their collaboration with the exhibition.