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25/11/2007

BAC! Festival 07

Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona CCCB, Barcelona

Faithful to its compromise with emerging and transgressive art, BAC!, the Contemporary Art Festival of Barcelona, dedicates its eighth edition to the great contemporary city of Babylonia. Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, Paris, Rome, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paolo, Hong Kong, Miami… In this world of globalization, countries are identified by their cities as settings of the daily confluence of millions of people. Phenomena such as global migration, socio-cultural interaction, art, fashion, new technologies, gastronomy, alongside with a growing loneliness and depersonalization, have “fed” a new urban model based on an exhausting rhythm of life.

From November 26 until December 20, 2007, various spaces in and outside Barcelona will become fields of multidisciplinary artistic proposals. Through murals, photographs, videos and installations, the artists will present their statements on the central theme of this edition, establishing a parallelism between the great variety of cultures that emerged in ancient Babylon and the chameleonic character of the contemporary city.

As always, the central statement of the Festival (BAC!CENTER) will take place at the Centre of Contemporary Culture in Barcelona (CCCB). In this edition, the show draws special emphasis to photography, mural and graffiti -the last two artistic disciplines born and raised in the streets. The exhibition, which celebrates its official opening on November 26, features acclaimed artists such as Michael Wolf, Virgilio Ferreira, Seb Janiak Andrew Lang, Ai Kijima, Mariana Vassileva, Cesar Pesquera, Victor Castillo, Diva, Eduardo Infante and Delphine Delás.

On the other hand, video art maintains its key role as the parallel main protagonist of the show. This year BAC!CAM has been born as a special section dedicated to this contemporary artistic genre exhibited in four sections. CAM CENTER presents works selected from those participating in the Festival’s competition, while CAM REDES is dedicated on the exhibited videos of the distinct art spaces that form BAC! REDES. AFTER URBAN, curated by Luca Curci, features a selection of the contemporary emerging video art creation, while GLOCALIDADES, curated by Angie Bonino, consists of a selection of Peruvian video art. Moreover, the Sala SAM from Santiago de Chile presents especially for BAC “Circuit” a show of global video-art by Valentina Serrato, Nycoukatiushka, Nicolás Grum, and Mauricio Garrido. These videos will be also screened in CCCB during BAC! CENTER.

Following a model initiated in BAC! 06 and focused on video and multimedia art, REDES is based on the premise of creating a community representative of the most novel artistic configurations on a national and an international level. REDES will expand BAC! BABYLON 07 over Barcelona, with a list of new galleries added to last year’s entries. BAC! 07 will occupy a total of 11 exhibition spaces in the city, among which are Iguapop Gallery, Comité, Galería Niu, La Cámara Lúcida, Rojo Artspace and OB ART. Outside Barcelona, BAC! 07 is celebrated for the first time in Madrid, in Valencia, Granada and Castellon. In Madrid, AVA Gallery presents the group show “Babylon”, counting on the presence of artists such as Ouka Lele, Rita Martorell, José María Mellado, Rafael Garcia, Diego Canogar, Álvaro Villarumbia, Mr. Hierro and John Hughes. In addition MAD is MAD presents Andrés Jaque in an interactive one man show under the title “Skin Gardens”. In Valencia, La Sala Naranja features Juan Rayos, Beatriz Sánchez Sánchez, Ho Wai-Fong, Carlos Llavata, Pere Siusa, Koke Vega and Id Mora.

But BAC breaks the national frontiers. Paris (Gallerie Milyeux 89 and Mex-Parismental), Rome (Zoneattive), Verona (Artericambi), Bologna (Grafique Art Gallery), Lecce (Primo Piano Living Gallery), Santiago de Chile (Balmaceda 1215, AFA, and SAM), Montevideo (Harto-Espacio) and Charro Negro (Guadalajara, Mexico) become partners of this special alliance.

Some of the best Art and Design Schools of Barcelona are mobilized for BAC!. The Instituto Europeo de Diseño (Vetrina IED) presents video creations of its students, while the IDEP School of Design reflects on the problems of housing with a patchwork of thirty square metres. One the other hand, BAC! BABYLON 07 expands and renovates its structure by strengthening its content with a series of conferences whose interactive discourse among artists, curators, theorists and the general public will act as generator of a BAC! 07. VIII Ediction.

International Festival of Contemporary Art in Barcelona. dialogue on culture and contemporary art. Four conferences will open a reflexion space on the current phenomena predominating in contemporary cities. The Derivart collective will participate with an interactive Project on the problem of housing, Erick Hauck will give a speech on Urban Art as Resistance to War, the architect Willy Müller will offer a thorough analysis of the way we imagine the past that we would live in the future and Santiago Cirugeda will delight the public with his Urban Recipes.

With the eighth edition of the Festival BAC!, “La Santa”, New Space of Experimentation and Contemporary Creation, pays homage to its origins, the uncompromising art as it takes shape in the streets, outside the margins of institutional art. More than 100 artists and 25 spaces in different places in the world have entrusted their projects to us, aspiring for freshness, audacity and innovation. Thanks to all those who have rendered possible this eight edition of BAC!.

The eighth edition of BAC! Festival attempts a radiography of modern Babylon, pointing at its schizoid and frenetic existence. Unknown neighbours, immigrants and fleeting passersby alongside tourist buses, museums, clubs, restaurants and afters. Cars and trains, traffic and delays, contamination and noise. Fears and joys, interferences and unexpected fusions. Fictional design of prosperity versus homeless people, illusions and disillusions. The facades of the city do not always correspond to the beats of the heart of all those who inhabit their interiors. In the same way as in anterior editions, BAC! CENTER, the central proposal of the Festival, assumes the weight of bringing ahead our response in regard to the world that surrounds us.

ÇBAC! Babylon. This year the participating artists in the show have based their responses on a sincere premise: look Babylon in the eyes, this indulging but at the same time monstrous siren that contains us. But, confronting oneself with the city implies revelation and selfknowledge. Despite its diversity, its multiculturalism, religions, constantly changing neighbours and exotic tastes, the principal actors of the Babylon drama are always ourselves. In the exhibition, wall painting is converted into a symbol of the ephemeron as created on the walls, fences and panels of the city. Condensing various genres into a single medium, such as graffiti, illustration and painting, an urban-like ambience is created within the show. It is unlikely to imagine a clean and disciplined city. The law of the street is disorder…

On the other hand, photography serves to demonstrate the tendency of the babylonic global on various parts of this world, be it New York, the metropolises of Asia or the very same Barcelona. A panoramic format predominates as if the insatiable vision of no beginning or end were fully identified with life in the big cities of today that never sleep. There are also apocalyptic visions of the future -hasn’t the city always been the best place of the futuristic dreamful contemplation of the arts?- neither symbolic visions of the growing impersonalization and loneliness in the big cities through deserted frames. A series of audiovisual installations, alongside four sessions of video art, complement the rather static vision of photography as a recollection of human experiences and artistic experimentations lived in any corner of the urban world. As if it was a satellite, BAC! expands its gaze, configuring, thus, a virtual map of the audiovisual creations that have offered us artists and collectives in various countries of the world. In this way, the great community generated in the last edition with UNITED BAC! 06 is steadily growing. If some time in the past ancient Babylon existed, now its remains -destroyed by the bombs of war- are still afoot, serving as a supplying base of military services. But its heiress, the contemporary Babylons viewed at their peak, exceed the limits of the imagination of those who constructed the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens with their hands. What margin is left to us to imagine the future ahead? In their majority, the participating artists in the show place themselves with scepticism towards the problematic characteristics of the city.

Multiculturalism, grand offers and good restaurants coexist harmoniously alongside social inequality, poorness, ghettos, marginalization, housing and mortgage problems. The effect of Babylon is desolating. Sensible but at the same time uncompromising, the artistic community of BAC! 07 sends a proposal of resistance. It is upon us, spectators, to stop, reflect and act. By all means, the future of Babylon is in our hands.

Behind the official image of BAC! 07 lies Michael Wolf and his palimpsests of buildings inspired by the complex urban dynamics of Hong Kong, a city which with an overall population density of 6.250 inhabitants per square meters incarnates more than any other metropolis of this planet the essence of the chameleonic and grotesque Babylon. Giant buildings with sixty floors on average ascend towards the sky forming a microcosmos in a city of macro cities. Soft walls separate dining rooms, bedrooms and living rooms of Lilliputian flats, whose lack of space forces their owners to hang their belongings outdoors.

In “Architecture of Density” Wolf registers with his camera the invasion of privacy into the public, by creating an abstract mosaic of windows that brings together thousands of intimate stories. His buildings are living beings that breathe life, reminding us that behind the walls of Babylon there will always be a handful of souls. As in the case of Babel, the towers of Asia speak on behalf of thousand of mouths and languages. The growing impersonalization and massification, as dictated by the grand impetus of Babylon, will never be able to defeat the lyric song of humanity.

BAC! features for the first time in Barcelona the work of German-American photographer Michael Wolf (1954). After a long career as photojournalist in Europe and Asia for mediums such as Stern, Wolf decided in 2000 to canalize his energy to his personal works. Since then he has developed various projects revolving around the idiosyncrasy of Asian metropolises, especially of Hong Kong, a city that has been his home since 1994. His visual universe questions the way in which human beings are literally diminished by modern progress, massification and industrialization. Wolf has already published two monographs and has realized various shows in Europe, Asia and the States.

BAC’s official image comes form his most recent book “Hong Kong: Front Door/ Back Door”, published by Thames & Hudson in 2005. (Courtesy Fifty One Fine Art Photography, Antwerp)

CCCB
Calle Montalegre 5 - Barcelona

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