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22/7/2003

After the news

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona CCCB, Barcelona

POSTMEDIA DOCUMENTARIES

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona presents the exhibition AFTER THE NEWS. Postmedia Documentaries, conceived and directed by the artist and art critic Carles Guerra.

The exhibition brings together the work of eighteen international creators, who, using a wide variety of documentary practices, approach journalistic news from very different perspectives of time, space and cause to the media.

In this project, events that have been news (the case of the Prestige, the sinking of the submarine Kursk, the conflict between Israel and Palestine, violence in borderlands, for example) distance themselves from the drama with which the mass media imbue them. The narration of reality takes a very different form - more active and subjective and, in some cases, more distant, even. It is as though the creators invited to take part allow the news item to take place, and then go there to make a new mark, offer a new view, in the confidence that they can capture the images that are produced on the periphery and around the hazy limits of reality. Visitors cease to be instant consumers of current affairs to become spectators of fragments and details of events that are very present in their memories yet which went unnoticed during the massive media onslaught.

The exhibitors range from well-known documentary makers such as Peter Forgács, Chantal Akerman, Alan Berliner, Johan van der Keuken and Joaquim Jordà, to young artists who have adopted the documentary register as an extension of their aesthetic practices, such as Asier Mendizábal and Iñaki Garmendía, Ursula Biemann and Angela Sanders, Vahida Ramujkic and Laia Sadurní. Photography is represented by Hannah Collins, Allan Sekula and Bruno Serralongue, as is work that is more journalistic in origin, with Stanley Greene and Patrice Barrat. Since After the News examines the definition of documentary practice, it also includes the testimony of the writer G. W. Sebald, whose novels stand out for their productive ambiguity between fiction and documentary.
After the News divides its attention between a formal and a thematic reading. It is an exhibition that highlights the presentation of heterogeneous documentary mechanisms: series of photographs, videos, film projections, interactive video installations, audiovisual archives, Internet and television, as well as urban routes and webloggers, all come together in a single space.

The selection of works and productions, however, follows a mainly thematic criterion. From the case of the Prestige, the situation in the Basque Country, the other face of new urban planning in Barcelona, the violence of emigration as experienced at the borders between Mexico and the United States, and between Morocco and Spain, to issues that are more extensive in time, such as the disappearance of the Soviet bloc, the holocaust, the conflict between Israel and Palestine during the war in Iraq, the sinking of the submarine Kursk, and conflicts of a more subjective and familiar nature, whose scope is reduced to that of the person of the author.

Carles Guerra, the exhibition curator, writes:
'After the News explores documentary practices that can be interpreted as the reverse side of the media obsessed by the figure of breaking news. The time of the news is not the time of the event, and falls a long way short of its development. Reality and its vicissitudes require a time period that extends beyond news bulletins in their extreme pursuit of synthesis. This excess of reality can only be assumed if the characteristic sequence of the dominant media is interrupted; a sequence in which a headline is condemned to disappear to make way for the next. This approach, along with these other conditions for observation, give rise to documentary mechanisms that abandon their vantage point at the heart of the news event. Instead, they capture the expansion wave of the event, thereby contributing another temporality, another causality. They defy what we could refer to as 'the monitorisation of attention'.

Both the crisis of classic photojournalism, with its obsession for the instant and the baroque nature of shock, and the crisis of the informational authority with which the Internet has presented television, are signs of renewal in the form of these new documentary practices which, despite relinquishing proximity to the focus of the news item, do not deny its referenciality. In any case, the reference multiplies and diversifies to the point of including discreet echoes of the news item itself.

These new documentary practices, characteristic of the postmedia era, are no longer the property of the professional informant in his manifestations of journalist or documentalist. They bring together artists, film-makers, novelists, visual anthropologists, amateur ethnographers and anonymous citizens who place their images into circulation. Unlike what happens in the dominant media, these documentaries superpose the moments of the information and of debate. They cease to respond to a supposed professional ethical imperative that sets out to systematically separate events from their valuation. And that is not all - they actually take advantage of their documentary initiatives to openly identify opinion and information, and, in passing, break down the rhetoric of objectivity. They can, in fact, be a way of intervening in reality. A new activism of representation.'

Press conference: 23 July, at 12 midday

Opening: 23 July, at 7 p.m.

PRODUCTION
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
(Allan Sekula's photographs were produced jointly with the 'Cultura/s' supplement of La Vanguardia.)

CO-ORDINATION AND DOCUMENTATION
Exhibitions Unit of the CCCB

CURATOR
Carles Guerra

MONTAGE DESIGN AND DIRECTION
Iván Bercedo and Jorge Mestre

SPACE
Hall 3 of the CCCB

EXHIBITION OPENING TIMES
Tuesday to Saturday: from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sundays and holidays: from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Closed on Mondays (except holidays)

ADMISSION TO THE EXHIBITIONS
Admission to one exhibition: 4 euro / 3 euro
Combined admission to two exhibitions or more: 5.50 euro / 4 euro
Free admission: under-16s and Friends of the CCCB
Concessions on Wednesdays (except holidays) and for senior citizens, students and the unwaged.
Articket: 15 euro. Entry on a single ticket to the CCCB, MACBA, MNAC, La Pedrera, Fundació Antoni Tàpies and Fundació Joan Miró
Friends of the CCCB. Become a Friend for a Year. Individual: 27 euro / Students and the unwaged: 22 euro / Family: 35 euro

Ticket sales at the desk of the CCCB, branches of Caixa Catalunya and by calling the Tel-Entrada service on 902 10 12 12

Guided visits to the exhibitions: Tuesday to Friday at 6 p.m. and Saturdays, Sundays and holidays at 11.30 a.m.

Press Service of the CCCB - Mònica Muñoz
Telephone: 93 306 41 00 / 23 - Fax: 93 306 41 01

Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona

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