calendario eventi  :: 

X

28/4/2013

Three-sided Match

Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona MACBA, Barcelona

Jugada a tres bandas (Ja3b) [Three-sided Match] is a project designed to bring together art galleries, curators and artists. In its third consecutive edition, the aim is not only to become a regular date in the annual calendar of national contemporary art, but also to broaden the programme by taking place simultaneously in Madrid and Barcelona. Twenty-one art galleries from Madrid and seven from Barcelona will take part in Ja3b 2013 with exhibitions that will create links between both cities, together with others with a marked international approach.

A curator from each city –Alberto Sánchez Balmisa (Madrid) and Direlia Lazo (Barcelona)– has been commissioned to select video works from the collections of the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo and MACBA respectively. Their combined selections will be seen as part of a unique programme in both art centres.

---

Selection by Alberto Sánchez Balmisa
Esse est percipi
Reflections of the self in MACBA's video collection

Esse est percipi is a selection of video works from the collection of the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) that reflect on the artist's perception and representation of the self in contemporary culture.

The title is taken from the famous phrase by the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley, 'Esse est percipi' (To be is to be perceived). With this proposition, Berkeley intended to deny the philosophical dualism running through Western thought, from Plato to Descartes, separating the mental world from the world of the objects. For Berkeley nothing exists beyond our mental perception that it exists. Equally, human beings do not exist unless perceived by others.

Under these premises, Esse est percipi is constructed as a visual itinerary that, according to Berkeley's proposition, can only exist if perceived by an external being. And yet, contrary to what it may seem, it is not a mental construction designed by an author, the curator, with the intention of manipulating a series of iconographic elements (the works) in order to impose a particular reading (perception/interpretation) on the viewer. On the contrary, the programme is designed to confront viewers with a mirror reflecting each and every one of their doubts.

Faced with this mirror, various artists will ask in the first or third person questions of identity and physicality –their limits, complexities and meanings– while also questioning the condition of video and the moving image. Negated or altered, their bodies will experience the need to be perceived. Or perhaps, who knows, they will realise that they cannot perceive anything, thus generating a perverse dialectic that tries to create a space without contingency where the paradox acts as detonator for the construction of meaning.

Selection by Direlia Lazo

In his analysis of the cinema of Robert Flaherty, André Bazin identified a tendency where the ‘image is evaluated not according to what it adds to reality but what it reveals of it', besides the desire to show time rather than suggest it. Meanwhile, Matthew Flanagan talks about ‘the aesthetic of the slow' in reference to the work of a number of filmmakers of the last two decades where form and temporality are strongly present and the slowing down of the pace displaces the supremacy of narrative causality. Both impressions inform our approach to certain contemporary video art, where it is the contemplated image that provides the narrative and generates content.

The current selection of videos, made from the CA2M Collection, comprises a series of works where contemplation, as an unspoken language, reveals the potential meaning inherent in the image without the necessity for dramatic construction. Here, the story is built and developed in visual codes and in different tempos to conventional narrative.

The programme sets out to explore contemplation as a narrative resource that, in its stillness and tranquillity, underscores meanings in certain given contexts, and contemplation as an inherent element for documenting performative actions.

---

Program

Monday 29 April, 7.30 pm.

Alberto Sánchez Balmisa, selection from the MACBA Collection
Total duration of session: 60 min. Approx.

Selected works:

Samuel Beckett, Film, 1965. 20'15"
Vito Acconci, Three Relationship Studies, 1970. 12'30"
Bruce Nauman, Pinchneck, 1968. 2'
Dan Graham, Performer/Audience/Mirror, 1975. 22'52"
Gary Hill, Commentary, 1980. 50"

Direlia Lazo, selection from the CA2M Collection
Total duration of session: 41 min. Approx.

Selected works:

I
Gaillard, Cyprien. The Smithsons, 2005 (# Inv. CE01373) 4'
Negro, Álvaro. Battersea Station, 2003 (# Inv. CE00799) 2'
Welch, Roger. Hudson River, 2005 (# Inv. CE01197) 7' 33"

II
Landau, Sigalit. Barbed Hula, 2001 (# Inv. CE00758) 2'
Abramovic, Marina. Nude wiht Skeleton, 2004 (# Inv. CE01000) 15'

III
Guimaraes, Cao. Da Janela do meu quarto, 2004 (# Inv. CE00963) 5'
Apóstol, Alexander. Documental, 2005 (# Inv. CE01500) 2'
El Perro. Skating Carabanchel I, 2005 (# Inv. CE1200) 4'

The programme will also be screened on 14 April, 18.30 h., at the Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo. Av de la Constitución 23, 28931 Móstoles, Madrid.

Alberto Sánchez Balmisa (Madrid, 1979). Art critic and freelance curator. Co-editor of FLUOR, a magazine of contemporary culture; assistant editor of EXIT, Imagen y Cultura; and editor of EXIT Book, a review of art and visual culture books. Author of over 200 articles and essays in specialist publications, catalogues and anthologies, his most recent exhibition projects include the First Art Biennale, Naturaleza y Urbanismo del Pais Vasco ‘Urdaibaiarte', entitled Sentido y sostenibilidad (Sense and Sustainability), Reserva Natural de la Biosfera de Urdaibai, Euskadi, 2012; Una fábrica, una máquina, un cuerpo: arqueología y memoria de los espacios industriales (A factory, a machine, a body: archaeology and memory of industrial spaces), Centre d'Art La Panera, Lleida, 2009, and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC, Mexico City, 2010.

Direlia Lazo (Havana, 1984) graduated in the History of Art from the Universidad de La Habana and participated in the De Appel Curatorial Programme 2009–10. She was an assistant curator at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wilfredo Lam, the institution organising the Havana Biennale. She has also worked as coordinator of the pedagogical project Cátedra de Arte de Conducta, founded and directed by the artist Tania Bruguera. In 2009, she was one of the winners of the Inéditos 09 Prize for the exhibition project Just around the corner. Her curatorial projects include: Cero. Jóvenes artistas cubanos (Zero. Young Cuban Artists), Convento San Francisco de Asís, Havana (2007); I'm not here. An exhibition without Francis Alÿs, at the De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam (2010); Somewhere Else, Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona (2011). She assisted on the exhibition Marcel Broodthaers. L'espace de l'écriture curated by Gloria Moure for the MAMbo, Bologna, as well as on a book of the artist's writings edited by Moure and recently published by Ediciones Polígrafa. She is currently organising a cycle of exhibitions under the title The Story Behind, to be shown at Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona, over a one-year period. She occasionally contributes texts on Cuban and Latin American art for catalogues and magazines.

Image: Samuel Beckett, "Film", 1965 (filmstill)

MACBA Auditorium
Plaça dels Àngels, 1 - 08001 Barcelona
Limited places
Free admission

stampa

permanent link