calendario eventi  :: 

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19/6/2008

Situation

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea CGAC, Santiago de Compostela

Curator Manuel Segade

Artists: Mónica Cabo, David Ferrando Giraut, Enrique Lista, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez, Rubén Santiago

The CGAC is 15 years old as a Galician institution devoted to contemporary art. Situation is the project designed in three sections for this anniversary, but not as a mere commemoration; it makes the most of a circumstance of visibility and expectation to create a new discourse and articulate a collective analysis about present contemporary art in Galicia. The basic and non-conformist question it wishes to ask is, What is the capacity of a cultural institution to generate an effective community?

Situation_Exhibition. In itself, Situation intends to be a diagnosis. For this exhibition six artists from the Galician environment have worked on their relationship with Galician art and the way they can express their position in it. They got involved in a risky strategy: achieving specific ambitious projects which could not be brought to fruition without the support of an institution, in order to think about work methods in art and communication and interference regarding the public sphere. The starting point is the conviction of intensifying an ongoing programme of research, production and support for the art community which simply acquires an evident will for public communication.
The intention is not to show a generation or an alternative. What the exhibition shows is public exercises of a demanding artistic work regarding representation, which in a specific panorama is expressed as wide, open and prospective. A commitment to making projects real, bringing forward here and now a situation of contagious interchange and productive contamination.

Mónica Cabo. Escenografía complementaria. Mónica Cabo (Oviedo, 1978) studied at the Fine Arts Faculty in Pontevedra and developed her exhibition career in Galicia, focused on queer discourse. Her work starts with a common object, a children’s play park, in which she carries out a transfer of meaning with a slight change: from a multicoloured structure to an entirely black one –done deliberately by Splash®– which converts children’s games into something mysteriously adult, more like a dungeon for sadomasochistic practices. Playfulness is developed in these practices in previously designed scenographies with a high degree of stylisation. In the case of this sculpture, perfectly conditioned to be both useful and safe, the semantic perversion activates the adult desire to play in a different scale; it becomes a mental scenario for a differentiated social code. As Nietzsche said, “Maturity means recovering the seriousness we had when we played as children”.

David Ferrando Giraut. ROAD MOVIE - PERPETUUM MOBILE. Based on research in second-hand record shops, David Ferrando (Negreira, 1978) finds a recurrent topic: the decadent images on sleeves showing the ruins of buildings and damaged cars. The obsolescence of vinyl becomes a model for a plot for a film allegory: returning to his usual B-movie imagery and with the collaboration of Adivina Producciones, makes a continuous film in a 360º sequence shot about an accident in a natural landscape in Negreira, with an original sound track by Nigel Yang. An accident is logically somewhat instantaneous; here time has stopped in a melancholic continuum which joins romantic poetry to the skilful dimension of the cinema. An image constructed in movement which comes back to itself time and again in a continuous litany about the ruin of representation.

Rubén Grilo. O mundo é teu. Since 2007 Rubén Grilo (Lugo, 1981) has been developing an open project with no finishing date in sight, regarding Ev, a character performed by an actor who represents the possibility of his ideal partner. Over the three days it took to film the first chapter of the project entitled O mundo é teu the city of Santiago became a scenario designed for the main character. The actor wandered through the city followed by a camera, reacting to the provocation of twenty actors and crowds of real people in a plot which blends reality and fiction to express centrifugally the presence of the CGAC in the environment. Somewhere between a role game and reality theatre, the project is formalised in a triple narration: a vertiginous video edited in the format of a TV reality show; the mural cut up of the various different references and keys making up the script outlined about the city; and finally, a parallel literary investigation carried out by writer Diego Ameixeiras (Lausanne, Switzerland, 1976), who reinvents characters’ contexts and psychologies, outlined in a drift beyond what was projected.

Enrique Lista. Retirada temporal das orlas da Facultade de Belas Artes de Pontevedra. Enrique Lista (Cambre, 1977) is characterised by the ironic adoption of a conceptual minimum strategy rooted in the aesthetics of administration with no concessions. From 23 May to 1 September 2008, the class graduation photographs of each year at the Fine Arts Faculty in Pontevedra, where he himself obtained his degree, were removed from their usual public location. As it was impossible to exhibit as such, as the artist did not have the legal image rights of each student, he documents each one of the gaps in their position, exhibiting each absence life size. To fill the gap left by the students, the artist provides the faculty with an information leaflet about the working, economic and professional possibilities for students with a degree in Fine Arts in Galicia.

Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez. HOMBRES CORRIENDO... ENCAJAR UNA ESCULTURA. In the site-specific tradition of the CGAC Double Space, Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez (As Neves, 1968) approaches a series of nine possible actions which culminate in sculpture: fit a 30 metre long sculpture in a space three times smaller. At the beginning of July, the public will be able to attend the installation of this flexible structure covered in peat, which will mark the walls with traces of the violence generated by its own insertion. The long working time required for such a huge production effort operates as an index of the excess of necessary work to conquer an emblematic space for contextual sculpture. The possibilities that the projects for other actions about Santiago de Compostela generate add relationship and symbol networks together, creating a semantic constellation of approaches around, which amplify the disproportion of the end sculpture with their imagery.

Rubén Santiago. PAN-pan. Rubén Santiago (Sarria, 1974) is characterised by production of a broad critical scope, straining relations between the artist and the institution and his work and the possibility of reception. In this case he builds a workshop for producing wafers or non-consecrated hosts. In this fully operative workshop, a specialised worker is entrusted with making the hosts while the exhibition lasts, making available to the public the result of his work and the totality of production. The title, apart from the obvious reference to unleavened bread (pan means ‘bread’ in Spanish) refers to the Greek prefix pan-, meaning ‘all’, proposes a universalist reading of a specific religious symbol dispossessed of all Catholic meaning, as it is shown as food, a souvenir or any other product on the market. It is also a reference to the so-called pan-pan, an international convention used when there is an emergency in a vehicle with no immediate personal or material risk. This sensation of urgency is what the artist wishes to transmit with a moral machine which mocks the ecumenism of art and the mechanical ways it is received.

Situation_Publication. The exhibition comes with a publication, which by way of instalments will progressively enable us to draw near the translation of the artists’ working process, through editorial insertions designed by them and interviews with the project curator.

Situation_Questionnaires. At the same time as exhibition, questionnaires have been promoted throughout Galicia via María Álvarez Cebrián, an agent who is not related to art. Participants –artists, managers, art gallery owners, museum staff, critics, journalists, curators, cultural businessmen, foundations etc– will try to answer the question as to whether there is an effective scene of art in Galicia and how to identify the points of interest which are a concern at this particular moment of history for this immediate context.
The initial intention, based on various meetings whose end goal is to edit an open narration, is to make the profound structure of fold against fold visible; just as in corrugated cardboard, this enables the outer contact surface to become strong and resistant, i.e. structured.

In order to obtain information or pictures about current or past exhibitions and activities, please send an e-mail to cgac.prensa@xunta.es or call to (+0034) 981 546 632.

The Galician Center for Contemporary Art CGAC
Valle Inclán s/n
15704 Santiago de Compostela
Hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 11:00-20:00. Monday: Closed.
Handicapped Access
To schedule a guided tour, you can request information by mail or by telephone.

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