calendario eventi  :: 

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5/10/2005

Crossing Cultures

Metronom, Barcelona

Conceptual Photography and African Art in the Rafael Tous Collection

Curated by Rafael Tous

As curator of his own collection, Rafael Tous brings together two different forms of looking, of creating a representation and of turning reality into fiction.

Crossing can refer to a meeting of roads or trajectories; but it is also a pairing off, an act that culminates in conception. The act of provoking a relationship, stimulating readings and references, is linked to the contemplation with which the collector creates a collection in his or own private surroundings, establishing intellectual and emotional relationships between the pieces in a collection.

But the relationship between the two types of cultural artefact is not just the random result of a chance encounter but one that is linked through the concepts of rite and fiction.

In ancient societies, rites fulfilled a basic role in the life of the individual, by maintaining cohesion within the community and giving meaning to relationships between that community and the unpredictable forces of nature.

What anthropologists call rites of passage reduced the traumatic impact of the transition from one stage of existence to another, including the passage into death; transitions that now, in our cultures, often grow, become diffuse, are filled with anguish.

African sculpture is the memory of a ritual: it has a magical, religious role to play. Its function is related to initiation ceremonies, rites of passage from adolescence to maturity.

These are objects of power, with the capacity to transform the human individual: putting on a mask, for example, involves adopting the identity of what is being represented. Its purpose, in abstract, is to conjure, to ensure the immediate security of life.

Conceptual art, on the other hand, is itself a transferral, a movement that generates meaning in its exchange with the viewer. These photographs are theoretical objects that reflect on narrative through the way in which an image speaks about what is real. Conceptual strategy involves a discontinuity in discourse: meaning is truncated, significance opens up and is never fully revealed.

In fact, it is the viewer who, in his or her exchange with the pieces, participates actively in the creation of their contents.

A collection is never completed: its meaning is a potentiality that is multiplied with each new incorporation. The exhibition Crossing Cultures: Fictions and Rites is reversible; the viewer can look at both conceptual art and African art. But it is also reversible thematically: the viewer is confronted with the other in art and the other in culture.

This encounter with the other creates a situation of transformation, of passage. This duality, which combines suggestions and meanings, reclaims both rite and action on the part of the viewer: the beholder who constructs his or her own fictions in the face of representation in today’s society.

ARTISTS ON SHOW

SOPHIE CALLE Paris, 1953

Chambre avec vue (2003)Le porc (2002)

From the end of the 70s Calle has worked through her own intimacy: her exhibitions of photography show private ceremonies as an intimate journal with devices that mix icons and texts. Reality is used as a starting point to fiction everyday life with a sense of mystery and thriller.
Calle dreamt that the night of the 5th to the 6th of October of 2002 the highest floor of the Eiffel Tower became her bedroom.

The autobiographical tale acquires sense when, the same day and with her own bed, she went there to make the action Chambre avec vue. Le porc refers to a dinner where a man tried to bed with her and, when she denied, told her: ‘you eat as a pig’. She pictures herself as a swine, superimposing the metaphor onto reality, creating an artificial memory.

TACITA DEAN Canterbury (Kent), 1965

Floh (2000)

Tacita Dean, one of the most important figures of the cinéma d’exposition, is also a great collector. When she was 8 years old, was able to pick up 8 four-leaf clover and she thought: I’ve reached a Guinness Prize’; then she was told that the biggest collection of them were of four thousand… But she kept on collecting.

Floh is a compilation of the photographs that Tacita Dean buys at London Flee Markets. Relating them as a sort of show album which displays a nostalgic familiar memory, it becomes a domestic souvenir at last recovered: something lost that recovers all its meaning. Transforming the lost with a new signifier acts exactly as a collector.


SAMUEL FOSSO Cameroon, 1962

Self portrait (1976) ; Self portrait (2000)

Besides Keïta and Sibidé, Fosso is one of the most important contemporary African photographers. Emigré from Cameroon to Nigeria, settled in Bangui, capital of the Central Republic of Africa. In 1975, when he was 13 years old, began to shoot his first personal works in the atelier where he worked; two years after opened his own. In his first self-portrait he was 16.

Through his photographs he deepens the conventions of the studio portrait researching the possibilities of representing his own image: the ironic differences with the topics around identity, the costumes allow his dreams to come true… have been read, for example by Okwi Enwezor, chief curator of the last Documenta of Kassel, as metaphors of the African continent.


ZHANG HUAN An Yang City , China, 1965

Foam (1997)

Huan is a Chinese artist chino exiled at New York. In his pieces interprets the Western tradition of performance from his own culture: an artist of life, according to the Zen creed, uses his own body as the painter uses the canvas or the musician the flute.

Foam, made in China, exhibits the vulnerability of his own body: his face is covered with soap and it lacerates his eyes, while in his mouth shelters pictures of his and his wife’s family. Communist regime erased his features, his identity; his subjectivity protects what remains, his memory and his identity.


MAGDALENA JETELOVÁ Prague, 1946

Atlantic Wall 01 Area of violence (1995), Atlantic Wall 04

The essential is no longer visible (1995). After Praga’s Spring, Jetelová searched for ways to exhibit art outside the official circuits of socialist realism. She explored another kind of formats, far away from the museum, using video and another advanced technological media which today are still on use.

The Atlantic Wall is a vigilance system which goes all over the perimeter of the European coast, from Norway to Spain, built between 1942 and 1944 when the intelligence of Germany foresaw the invasion. Taking as a starting point some thoughts of Paul Virilio on military spaces, Jetelová photographed the abandoned bunkers of Jutland: the tide eroded and displaced them, the artist projects with laser sentences of Virilio’s book Bunker archaeology (1975), ironic with the goals they pursued when built up.


ROBERT LONGO New York, Brooklyn, 1953

Man in the cities (1988/2000)

Man in the cities is considered as the first Longo’s mature work and one of the emblems of Postmodernity in art because of its manipulation of figurative conventions and its refusal to give access to a traditional narrative.

Those photographs are part of a process of representation which sets him in the position of a film director: on his terrace, the artist made some friends to pose, throwing tennis balls on them, shaking them roughly with ropes, to provoke forced poses. Then they were projected on paper to retrace them and an illustrator turned them into drawings and a serigraphic series.

Those ‘fallen angels’ or ‘damned souls’, as the artist called them, give expression to a generational identity; their clothes are elegant and sophisticated, but they are empty appearances, fruit of an unreal culture in the process of delegitimation.

ROGELIO LÓPEZ CUENCA Nerja (Málaga), 1959

Complícate (1995), El paraíso (1995), Navegar (1995)

López Cuenca handles icons produced by society using advertising or sign language from urban authorities. His conceptual strategy is institutional critic, ironic with the language of the mass communication, exhibiting at the public space and revealing troubles with political content at everybody view.

These three photographs, as posters, point at burning problems as social movements or immigration. The artist: “wants to force us to realise about something extremely alarming on our social order”.


DUANE MICHALS Mc Keesport (Pennsylania), EEUU, 1932

Heinsensberger’s magic mirror of uncertainty (1998)

Michals is one of the most prestigious photographers of the second half of the XXth century. He’s well known by his photographic portraits, incorporates silent narratives unfolding inside the image.

Dr. Heidensberger was one of the pioneers of quantum maths, discovering the difference of identity between two particles displacing along space. The movement transforms the particles: they share identical properties, but at the same time, they have loosing themselves in the process. As it is, the woman looking at herself in the distorting mirror gaze at her identity infix and ductile.


TRACEY MOFFAT Brisbane, 1960

Something more (1989)

Moffat produces complex photographic tales using all the iconic resources of the quote, displacement, appropiation and cliche, series that take profit the conventions of the movie story-board.

In the series in nine parts Something more, a young rural woman –Moffat plays the role by hi own- dreams on the richness and the glamour of the city. From the first picture, a kind of dramatis peronae, she portraits the conflict between two antagonistic women. The stereotype of the dramaturgy of Williams or the southern novels by Capote or McCullers serves to reconstruct the polysemy of the real, offers a broken story that the beholder must recompose.


JULIE MOOS Ottawa, 1965

Domestic (2001)

Educated in New York, Moos lives and works in Toronto. Domestic is part of a series of photographic portraits of the people in Birmingham, Alabama. With a mobile atelier, Moos shot people in pairs whose relations become the centre of the picture. The format is identical what makes the spectator, third subject of the picture, is fixed with light variations.

Domestic portraits wealthy owners with their employees for domestic tasks in their manors. The models usually are a white one together with an Afro American. The relation between them is not visible, is a communally assumption. Moos reflects on the paradigms of reading imposed on people immersed in a concrete community.

JOAO PENALVA Lisboa, 1949

Raphael’s father’s clock (2004), Kentaro´s teapot (2004),
Ralph’s pewter pitcher (2004)

Penalva studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London and remained there from 1976. From 1992 he abandoned painting to use another language. His work reflects on texts, on the instability from language and sense.

The three pieces exhibited analyse the sense of telling and retelling a story. Consist in framed boxes that contain several photographic ways of represent the same tale invented. The triple fiction is represented as the page of a book that tells a story, as an pictured object identified which the story is about and as an icon of the book’s page converted in photography. The verisimilitude of fiction is a triple trick of representation.

MIGUEL RIO BRANCO Las Palmas (Gran Canaria), 1946

Bullets (2002)

Río Branco uses photography as document, registry or testimony. Points at that which was forgotten or abandoned in social memory, but its poetic charge reveals a collective souvenir. His conceptual strategy is not away from the real, but magnifies it.

Bullets is a collage of photographs of the Fossar de las Moreres that portraits he impacts of the bullets which testify what happened in the exact point where the martyrs of the Catalan nationalism –that defended their wrights against the Felipe IV troops in 1714- were buried. Those bullets of the historical memory are recovered, showing that they are not so past as the dates indicate.

ÍÑIGO ROYO San Sebastián, 1962

Señor Estupor (1993)

Un individuo se señala cinco vísceras diferentes con cada uno de los dedos de sus dos manos.
Psicologist for the Country Basque University, Royo has worked in different artistic projects and pedagogic, as the series of short films with Oscar Currás or the organization of workshops and meetings at Arteleku (San Sebastian).

A sequence of photographic triptychs present the torso of the artist while he points with a finger at a part of his body, announcing the stupor before believing his own body. The disjoint among the different organs that he points at tautologically is a relentless repetition that is only useful to demonstrate the poor credibility it deserves.

VIBEKE TANDBERG Oslo, 1967

Taxi driver too (1998/2000)

This Norwegian artist works in London uses his own image to explore the identity of gender. Her pictures are as role playing games carefully mise en scène, pointing to her personal psycho-social relation with the world surrounding. Using her everyday life as a scenery, documents her metamorphic procedures also with video.

In this series, drives a taxi in Manhattan, at night. Recalling Taxi driver imitates De Niro as the image of the man secure in an unfriendly environment. Represents the uncertainty and the dependencies of a feminine individual in society.

JAVIER VALLHONRAT Madrid, 1953

Acaso # 62 (2003), Acaso # 10 (2001), Acaso # 28 (2001)

Successful fashion photographer in the beginning of the 80s for John Galliano or Jil Sander, Javier Vallhonrat developed a trajectory as an artist of enormous conceptual complexity and theoretical density which has granted him acknowledgements as the National Photography Prize in 1995 (the best recognition in Spain).

Acaso series deepens on his work about the difficulty of photographic representation in its conflictive relation with the true reality. This pictures of critical order investigate on the limits between object and image, between the action and the location. The results maintain the sinister ambiguities of conjuring all these possibilities.


JAVIER VALLHONRAT Den Haag, Holland, 1969

Gang (Hall) 2002 , Vievken (Kitchen) 2001

Zwakman has exhibited in the museums more important of the Netherlands, as Witte de With or the Stedelijk Museum. His photographs of landscapes or interiors are little models that then he photographs with a camera. Explores the deceptive aspect of photographs, denouncing its construction.

The everyday interiors one can see are lies, staging, representation machines, almost a toy. Those flats have never existed, they are copycats of copies, simulation screens. They are imaginary representations where nothing happens and at the same time, whose lack of detail announces something oppresive to happen: representation.

Image: Robert Longo 'Man in the cities'

Opening: October 6th

METRÒNOM - Fundació Rafael Tous d’Art Contemporani
Fusina 9 - Barcelona

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