Malaga-born artist Ángeles Sioli has been commissioned to design the front wall of the staircase leading to the Russian Museum Collection exhibit for the 2025 Málaga de Festival programme. This piece was inaugurated today, attended by the artist, the director of the Public Agency responsible for managing the Pablo Ruiz Picasso Birthplace Museum and other museum and cultural facilities, Luis Lafuente, and the director of the Festival de Málaga, Juan Antonio Vigar.
 
Ángeles Sioli's ‘Miles de millones de años’ is part of an organic piece about the organic, completed with the design carried out at the Malaga Pompidou Centre, a fundamental element of this triptych that seeks to guide the viewer's gaze to one of the most powerful worlds around us, that microscopic world populated by beings that remind us of the limits of the human condition. Sioli uses an imaginary scenario of aquatic and ancestral microorganisms as a starting point, a world with multiple evolutionary biological trials, possible or not, with symbiotic and collaborative environments as a condition of survival for billions of years.
 
With great scientific inspiration and following the artistic line that characterises this creator, —the combination of materials such as inks, fabrics, paper, glass, on the one hand, and strokes and drawings that have led her to build one of the most renowned artistic careers on the other— Sioli creates a great natural laboratory in which she looks through the microscope at a process of speciation that gave rise to diversity, in which millions of species from all kingdoms populated the planet and participated in the earth system, the great living being that makes the conditions of life today possible. An installation that uses the power of imagination to recreate a great evolutionary stage from which the first seas emerged.
 
For the Malaga-born artist, it is essential to invite people to reflect on 'Billions of years' by contemplating this world of microorganisms from which human life arises, a life that reminds us that, in order to have a possible future, with living conditions suitable for life as we know it until now, living beings depend on each other, in clear coexistence with the creatures of the planet.
 
Biography of Ángeles Sioli
 
An artist with a long career, she has a degree in Biological Sciences, a degree in Fine Arts and a Master's degree in Museology from the University of Granada. With many solo exhibitions under her belt, she has also taken part in regional and national group exhibitions. Her creative activity ranges somewhere between autobiographical and scientific reflection.
 
Her artistic work has led her to take part in international exhibitions such as Contemporary Art by Female Artists in Almería (2018); to have participated in the Women’s Perspectives Biennial in Seville (2016); or, more recently, to have inaugurated one of the most solid solo exhibitions in the Malaga exhibition scene in 2024, with 'Acrobáticas', at the MVA Cultural Centre.
 
History of interventions in the Russian Museum Collection
 
As part of the MaF 2018 programme, Darko was the first artist to intervene the Russian Museum Collection with '1er movimiento', a piece strongly linked to the premises of urban interventions, a practice in which the artist has been working for years and of which he is an unquestionable reference. In the next edition, Emmanuel Lafont was the selected artist with 'La mirada lateral', based on the work of psychologist Edward de Bono and his theory of lateral thinking. Julio Anaya Cabanding, with 'Palacio Mijhailovsky. 125 años acumulados', was commissioned for the 2020 edition of MaF with a piece that highlighted the trajectory of the museum's collection. In MaF 2021, Eryk Pall and David Burbano 's project '1 %' was selected for its aesthetic impact and strong conceptual development. The main ambition of this artistic proposal was to give visibility to the precariousness faced by artists due to health and social measures derived from the pandemic, a precariousness that the artistic network has been dragging along for more than a decade. A year later, Guillermo Mora intervened in the Malaga Pompidou Centre with ‘Sí pero no’ and the Russian Museum Collection/Malaga with 'Despintando rojo'. This brings us to the last edition with the mural 'El pintor de nubes', by Jorge Fin, a mural inspired by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky.  Ángeles Sioli becomes the first woman to intervene in the Russian Museum Collection for the Málaga de Festival.