Daniel Gasol at ADN Galeria, Barcelona: Los Hijos de Sodoma and the Uniform as Image

Two men in uniform. Neither is on duty, neither makes an arrest, neither salutes. They simply occupy the frame, dressed in the clothes of the Italian state. That refusal of action is the quiet provocation at the heart of Daniel Gasol’s “Los Hijos de Sodoma” at ADN Galeria in Barcelona, a video work shown from 9 to 30 November 2026 in the gallery’s Locker Room as part of Loop City Screen 2026.

The case behind the work

The starting point is a real episode. In 2014 in Italy, a gay scene in an adult film was sanctioned — not for its sexual content as such, but because the performers wore official uniforms, falling foul of laws that protect the symbols of the state. It is the kind of legal footnote that would normally vanish. Gasol treats it as a key.

Crucially, he moves the debate away from censorship, which is the obvious frame, and toward representation. The question becomes: who is entitled to wear the signs of authority, and what happens to those signs when they appear alongside desire? A uniform is supposed to stand for an institution. Here it stands only for itself — an image of power and masculinity, emptied of function.

Two languages: the state and the gesture

The video sets two systems of signs against each other. On one side is the normative, codified language of the state: insignia, cut, colour, rank. On the other is an informal, secret language — the non-verbal gestures that gay men historically used to recognise one another when visibility was dangerous. Gasol maps these gestures with an archivist’s care.

Seen together, the two vocabularies turn out to be oddly similar. Both are performances of belonging; both depend on being read correctly by the right audience. The difference is who gets to write the rules — and who gets punished for borrowing them. Readers familiar with the long history of the uniform in queer visual culture, from mid-century illustration to fashion photography, will recognise the terrain; Gasol’s contribution is to anchor it in a specific legal act.

Daniel Gasol: artist, researcher, teacher

Born in Tarragona in 1983, Gasol holds a doctorate from the University of Barcelona, where he teaches psychology and gender studies. His practice blends art, writing and academic research to examine how the media, art history and the law shape official narratives about identity, gender and class. He has been part of the curatorial team at La Capella since 2021 and has directed EART since 2023.

His book Arte (in)útil (2021) received an award from ACCA, the Catalan association of art critics, and his work Orden Público is in Spain’s national collection. He also edited Historia no oficial durante la hipotética Transición (2024). At ADN he previously presented “Higiene Pública: la sociedad como cuerpo enfermo” (Public Hygiene: Society as a Sick Body), from November 2025 to March 2026 — a project on how societies imagine and police a “healthy” social body. “Los Hijos de Sodoma” reads as a focused coda to that research.

ADN Galeria and Loop City Screen

Few Barcelona galleries are as consistently committed to political and critical art as ADN, on Carrer de Mallorca in the Eixample. Its Locker Room is designed for compact, concentrated presentations. Loop, Barcelona’s long-running festival and fair dedicated to the moving image, turns the city each autumn into a circuit of video screenings across galleries and institutions; a single-work presentation fits that format perfectly.

Why it matters

For collectors of moving image, Gasol is an artist whose work already sits in a national collection and whose research gives each piece unusual conceptual density. For visitors, the work is a reminder that censorship is rarely just about sex: it is about who controls the images that represent public authority. At a moment when debates about state symbols and queer visibility are intensifying across Europe, the video feels pointed without being didactic.

Visiting information

ADN Galeria, Carrer de Mallorca 205, 08036 Barcelona. 9–30 November 2026 (Locker Room, Loop City Screen 2026). Opening and visiting hours are not published on the exhibition page — check with the gallery on +34 93 451 00 64 or [email protected]. See our Daniel Gasol exhibition listing, the official exhibition page and more openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.