calendario eventi  :: 

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24/9/2013

Three exhibitions

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Alejandra Riera
Poetic(s) of incompleteness

"Poetic(s) of incompleteness" is the title that Alejandra Riera has chosen as a means to dwell on certain experiences at a greater depth than cinema, even if cinema's role is to accompany them.

Her study entails, as one its points of departure, a series of gestures which disclaim and challenge the predominant role of the solo artist and his or her work – an artist so often compelled to take on the role of “possessor” or “groundbreaker,” less and less possessed and passionate, no longer lost in dialog with the things and others.

A Poetics of incompleteness, therefore, that does not imply, as such, the impossibility of engaging in, and accomplishing gestures, but on the contrary, creates tensions that help do away with whatever oppresses us – whatever shapes and governs our perceptions.

Gestures such as those which the filmmaker Maya Deren confirmed in 1951 when she declared that she felt obliged to abandon her role as an artist and forgo any manipulation – aimed at creating an artwork – of the footage she gathered during trips to Haiti in 1947, 1949 and 1954. The footage included voodoo dances and rituals for a film project, which she intended to enlarge beyond the context of Haiti, and which ultimately remained unfinished. Having felt constrained, as she admitted, to film most “humbly and faithfully” a reality whose integrity imposed itself on her, she preferred, instead, to finish writing a study on voodoo cosmology, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (London & New York: Thames & Hudson, 1953).

She nevertheless did not entirely discard the footage and continued to work on it until her death; she henceforth abandoned any conventional use of the footage and of cinema. Deren stored the rushes she had filmed in Haiti in coffee tins and covered them with red adhesive tape. As she wrote, she put them aside and no longer knew where she had placed her initial plan for editing the film. She let go and refused to possess, without, however, refusing to give up.

In letting go in this way, she has offered us a gift. She had written: “My films are for everyone.” And the most striking aspect of that gift is perhaps the fact that this unmade “cinematographic collage” potentially combining footage shot in Haiti, sequences of children at play, which she intended to film in Haiti and New York, Balinese rituals, filmed by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, and Navajos dances remained dormant in her frenzy or intensity, and in her errors. It is perhaps even beyond the projection of these images that the coherency of such a collage can be found.

Outside of a collective endeavour, where individual preconceptions can be set aside, even if the seventeen reels of bare footage (approximately five hours of black and white silent film) shot by Maya Deren and preserved since 1972, at Anthology Film Archives, were restored they would not be legible. What needs to be restored, along with the rushes themselves, is the difficulty of transcribing an experience into film – without justifying or fetishizing it…

With: UEINZZ, Marine Boulay, atelier Lucioles, Alexandre Chanoine, Miriam Martín, Dean Inkster, Eleni Tranouli, Sybil Coovi-Handemagnon and Marine Lahaix (students from the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges). With additional assistance from Lore Gablier and Tamara Díaz.

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Maria Loboda
The beasts

Conceiving of artistic creation as a critical intervention in space (both physical and social) and making use of different types of tools and theoretical and methodological contributions, Maria Loboda (Krakow, 1979) explores the power of attraction exercised by the fetish, the influence of the irrational - and the unconscious - in our lives, thus revealing how blurry the boundaries are between the real and the imagined, between what is cultural and what is natural. In The beasts she engages in a kind of contemporary archaeology that starts with the recontextualization of objects containing various strata of meaning, in such a way that what is shown - even though it is inscribed in a place of safety such as the museum - has a potentially threatening dimension.

Assuming the Freudian maxim “the ego is not master in its own house,” Loboda believes culture and civilization to be precarious entities that arise not from the earth but rather from the need to protect oneself from it, from the primeval fear that humans have of the hostile setting they try to domesticate. Her fascination with the symbolism of antiquity, with the capacity that myths have to show the complex relationship between nature and culture, prompts her to place some crustaceans like those found in Egyptian obelisks into a paradigmatic piece of Enlightenment architecture, the old Sabatini Hospital. With this metaphorical gesture, she generates a disturbing connection between the discourse of the Enlightenment and an animal full of arcane symbolism, the Greek carcinos, or crab, which appears menacingly in the present with its Latin name, cancer, the most greatly feared epidemic of the developed world.

María Loboda has a special interest in the 1920s, a period that was born of a traumatic war and during which another war, even more cruel, was fermenting. In the exhibition, that experience of the impasse, of the strange calm that precedes and succeeds the storm, is suggested by pieces such as Interbellum and by the presence of a single falconry glove that seems to have lost the reason for its existence. In other works, the artist looks at the oblique relationship between violence and the sacred (showing the persistence of taboos in the social unconscious), or proposes a departure from history by using celadon, a glaze used traditionally in Chinese and Korean ceramics, which allows her to create a monochrome vacuum free of references.

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Gabriel Acevedo Velarde
Paranormal Citizen

Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (Lima, Peru, 1976) presents his artistic proposal in two of the most singular exhibition spaces at Museo Reina Sofía, Espacio Uno and the Protocol Room.

In the former, visitors are met with engraved signs - aesthetically related to op art and kinetic art - that evoke the areas of transition found in traditional film exhibition spaces, areas such as box offices and vestibules. Contact is thus made with the intermediate symbolic geography suggested by Acevedo, the area between State and spectacle and between citizen and spectator. Dichotomies formed by the political and the spectacular, focused on the architectures of power, civil servants and commercial establishments.

After selecting a seat, all of which have been used at some time prior to the founding of the museum, as office chairs that have been taken out of storage for this exhibition, spectators are shown Ciudadano Paranormal. The video contains a number of people talking about the presence of paranormal phenomena in official buildings, exploring ghostly interference in the supposed disciplined normality that usually characterises institutions. The artist includes what happens in front of the camera during moments not intended for broadcast, such as advertising breaks. This footage shows how television language is built and highlights its need for architectures that lose their functional meaning when they are not accompanied by the narrative and editing techniques that normalize such structures in the eye of the television viewer.

In the Protocol Room, viewers see Cliente Secreto, an audiovisual project that reveals the tools of authority embedded in labour policy. A series of uniformed supermarket employees conceal, under the cloak of nationalistic enthusiasm, the servility of work carried out like a beehive society or army, full of discipline-forming routines. These creations have their genesis in a context like Peru's current situation, in which the country is experiencing economic growth but such growth is not accompanied by a strengthening of institutions. This brings about the sensation of a progressive fading of the State, that spectral-State that confronts the authoritarian market about which Acevedo allegorically speaks to us.

Image: Gabriel Acevedo Velarde

Head of Press Office: Concha Iglesias
Assistants: Paz Ridruejo and Luisa Hedo Phone (+34) 91 7741005 / 06 prensa1@museoreinasofia.es

Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Calle Santa Isabel, 52 28012 Madrid
Monday, Wednesday, Thrusday, Friday, Saturday 10:00 a.m - 9:00 p.m
Sunday 10:00 a.m - 2:30 p.m
Sunday 2:30 a.m - 7:00 p.m only opens Collection 1 and ± I96I. Founding the Expanded Arts
Tuesday closed, including holidays
Free of charge, but seating is limited. Tickets must be collected at the box office (Sabatini building), two days before each session

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