Juan is a specialist in research based in art practice and is Deputy Chair of REF2021 Sub Panel 34: Art & Design History, Theory and Practice, having been a panel member in 2014. He was also a member of PBRF Creative and Performing Arts Panel 2018 (New Zealand Research Assessment Exercise).
Juan remains active in his own research, generating a diverse range of outputs. Exhibitions of his works are, more often than not, responsive to the particularities of the context where they are installed, but the work itself is almost always based on personal content. Juan writes autobiographical narratives and shorter descriptive texts, which he has deployed through videos, installations, typescripts, prints and performances; he has also worked with translation, performing several oral translations of works from Spanish literature, including Don Quijote, into English and, more recently, of American art magazine Artforum into Spanish. In 2006 ‘Juan Cruz A translation of Niebla (Fog) by Miguel de Unamuno’ was published by Forma and in 2007 another translated work, ‘SEDA, an Interesting Story’ was included in ‘The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B. and Other Stories’, Serpent’s Tail, London.
In 2017 Juan held a major museum exhibition of his work at MUSAC, Spain, titled Catalogue: it will seem a dream, which was accompanied by a 316 page book collecting numerous writings and published by Occasional Papers. More recently, in 2018, he exhibited an ongoing series of videos titled ‘I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m trying very hard’ at Matt’s Gallery, London.
In 2019 Juan was awarded an AHRC UK/China Creative Industries award for a project titled ‘Art Fair Innovations’ to develop better links and the enhanced used of digital media between the commercial art worlds in China and the UK.