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25/9/2008

Rendez-vous nowhere

Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea, Vitoria-Gasteiz

curated by Beatriz Herráez

Zbynek Baladrán, Kajsa Dahlberg, João Maria Gusmão & Pedro Paiva, Marcellvs L., David Maljković, Eva Morant Artazkoz, Silke Otto-Knapp, Oscar Tuazon.

rendez-vous nowhere is a group show that takes as its starting point the description of an epoch given in the book La Minéralisation de Dudley Craving MacAdam, written by the French artist and poet Juliette Roche in 1918. The novel depicts the arrival—and the cultural translation into a new context—of the European Avant-garde in the USA during the interwar years. The central character is D.C.M.A., a composite of a number of the leading lights of the Dada movement in New York. La Minéralization is a broken and encrypted account, a description of the artistic and political scene of the times that emerges from the fragments, impressions, conversations and details that are blended together in the book. "Am I really a medium of the world or just a reporter?" D.C.M.A. declares shortly before putting an end to his life in his studio, a suicide that takes the form of an erotic ritual in which the main character bites a copper beam and gets mineralized. La Minéralization —which has never been reprinted since 1924- will be translated into Basque and Spanish, and published in an edition to accompany the exhibition.

The works in the exhibition draw on accounts and events from a recent history, which are part of a collective memory, and are closely connected to literature and the Avant-garde movements of the 20th century. They are "collages" —assemblages of texts, images, architectures and objects—which establish personal codes and processes deliberately difficult to translate into a context other than their own. They are fragments of information transported "out of their space and time" that make use of an interrupted past to silently construct a possible social space of the present. In David Maljkovic's video installation Scene for new heritage "history is transformed into fiction and time engenders collective amnesia"; the watercolors by Silke Otto-Knapp represent groups of figures that vanish in transparent sets and blurred spaces; Oscar Tuazon's paper sculptures are folded pages of a 1968 architecture essay by Steve Baer; Kajsa Dahlberg's work compiles scribbles and notes that readers of Swedish public libraries left on the margins of Virginia Woolf's novel A Room of One's Own. Other works in the exhibition include the abstract spaces in Marcellvs L'videos; image production devices such as "The Projector of Solids (or the Dream of a Rock)", a camera obscura by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva; Zbynek Baladrán's examination of fragments of texts ranging from The Communist Manifesto to the writings of the Czech architect Karel Honzik; and sculptures by Eva Morant Artazkoz, an accumulation of traversable pieces as fragments of an object "that it is not expect to be revealed".


Seminar: "Un agréable mouvement dans les idées"

In addition, and following with the cultural centre's policy of providing a forum for debate on the areas of research covered by its exhibition program, a seminar will take part in Montehermoso on September 26th and 27th organized by Section7books.

Section7books is a bookstore located in castillo/corrales ( http://www.castillocorrales.fr ), an independent art space in Paris collectively and cooperatively run by a group of artists, curators, critics and writers. Founded in 2007, castillo/corrales is a space where a diversity of practices and views on art are turned into discursive motion. A space where the notion of a program means an attempt to make an argument, and articulate, enact or support a position, by way of exhibitions, conferences, workshops, collaborations, publishing and the distribution of books.

The seminar gathers different practitioners chosen for their involvement in the activity of writing, editing and publishing: Peio Aguirre (Spain), Thomas Boutoux (France), Melanie Gilligan (Canada), Will Holder (UK), François Piron (France), Matthew Stadler (USA), Benjamin Thorel (France), Oscar Tuazon (USA), and Kim West (Sweden). Individual presentations of their practices will be followed by collective discussions oriented towards themes such as: the ecology of small press publishing, amateur design, art criticism as a documentary practice, the militant uses of Internet, and the invention of dynamic libraries, whether institutional or personal ones. The seminar is linked with the display of a selection of books and magazines of the cultural centre's library, purchased at section7books.

Image: Zbynĕk Baladrán, Model of a Constructivist Tower, 2006 // 4´17´´ Courtesy of the artist.

Centro Cultural Montehermoso Kulturunea
Fray Zacarias Martinez, 2 - Vitoria-Gasteiz

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