The photographs and the video Mireya Masó (Barcelona, 1963) is presenting in this exhibition came about as a direct result of her residency at the Elephant Nature Park in Thailand, with the support of Fundación Arte y Derecho. The Elephant Nature Park is a centre for the protection of elephants which have suffered from man¹s exploitative abuse, but it is also a centre researching into more respectful forms of relating with these animals and the environment they live in.

Since her last exhibition in this gallery, with work based on parks in London entitled It's not just a question of artificial lighting or daylight, the artist's interest has shifted focus to the study of the human being through his projection over the construction of landscape. In all these projects, she eschews both staged reconstructions as well as the presence of actors, using minimal adjustments to enhance real situations following a process which she calls adjustments of reality. For this reason, almost all her videos feature animals living in urban-influenced areas, raising the idea of animal as man¹s alter ego.

The title of the exhibition, Elephant's Heaven, is the name of the jungle where they take the elephants from the camp she lived in, setting them free temporarily to be fed and to recover from human diets. The title of the video How an Elephant Came to Be, borrows its inspiration from a tale of the Karen native people, which she listened to during her evenings in the forest and which explains some of the "human" features of that animal, including its intelligence and affectionate behaviour. The Karen belief about the origin of the elephant describes how a woman was transformed, after disobeying her husband, by eating a bamboo leaf, and the gradual process of her change until becoming so fat that, after exhausting all the supplies of her people, she was forced to work by carrying tree-trunks in exchange for her unlimited need for food.

The ritual of the jungle and the Karen myth exemplify the two faces Mireya Masó focused on in this particular instance in her ongoing study of human projection on animals. From her attentive gaze on the tiniest details of their features, behaviour, and the elements of their environment, the exhibition pieces together a psychological portrait, overlapping the subject matter of elephants with the human condition, featuring orphans, the blind and the tuskless in her photographs and video.