calendario eventi  :: 

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30/1/2009

Five exhibitions

MUSAC Contemporary Art Museum, Leon

Celebrated Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset are to open an extensive site-specific project, made up of twelve striking large-format installations, six of which they have developed specifically for MUSAC. The Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León is to host the first major exhibition in Spain for Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff. Under the title The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer, the show brings together over 50 works produced between 2005 and 2008 in a range of formats (collage, painting, sculpture and mixed media), in an attempt to provide an overview of the artist's prolific production. Under the title of FIN (END), MUSAC will show the work of Marina Núñez (Palencia, 1966). This site-specific project including over 20 videos and a large visual installation approaches post-humanisation, taken as the process whereby we transcend certain features of our humanity that have become obsol ete. In the independent space Laboratorio 987 and by the title of Deriva, Colombian artist Mateo López will show his first solo exhibition in a Spanish institution. MUSAC's Showcases are to host a project focused on Point d'ironie, a publication established in 1997 by French fashion designer agnès b. in cooperation with Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and French artist Christian Boltanski.

Elmgreen & Dragset
Trying to Remember What We Once Wanted to Forget

MUSAC, Halls 1, 4, 5, 6 and Hall 1 courtyard

Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Coordinator: Eneas Bernal

Celebrated Scandinavian artists Elmgreen & Dragset are to open their latest exhibition on 31 January 2009 at MUSAC. In an extensive site-specific project made up of twelve striking large-format installations, six of which they have developed specifically for MUSAC, the artist pair shall take over a total floor space in excess of 2,500 m2, making their forthcoming show a milestone in their career, if only in terms of its sheer size. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, working with their curator, have developed a project that tackles the fine line between the personal and the collective, exploring the problems we face when our voracious public sphere encroaches on the private. Trying to remember... plunges viewers into a domestic environment, where they are confronted with the idea of community and with the ambivalence between nostalgia and desire.

Michael Elmgreen (Copenhagen, Denmark, 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Trondheim, Norway, 1969) started earning themselves a name as artistic partners in the early 1990s with their socially and politically engaged action art and installations. Amongst their most renowned pieces are their Powerless Structures, a series of works developed over time where the artists examine the concept of space and its multiple possibilities in terms of meaning and function. By inverting these terms, in the sense defined by Foucault, they put forth a compelling critique of art systems as seen through architecture, revealing a number of gender issues related to gay identity and aspects of youth and art-world subcultures. The issue of constructing meanings both in the private and public or institutional spheres, and their sexual connotations therefore stand as a key theme in Elmgreen & Dragset’s work. By transferring a given space into a new context that redefines its meaning and simultaneously applying calculated interventions to the way that very meaning operates, Elmgreen & Dragest manage to strip spaces of their conventional significance and open up new possibilities in terms of perception and appreciation. Their work thus provides a compelling demonstration of the alterability of established structures.

Their acclaimed shows at Tate Modern (London), Bonen Foundation (New York), Serpentine Gallery (London), Marfa (L.A.), and their contributions to a number of biennials, including Sao Paulo, Venice, Sydney, Yokohama, Berlin, Istanbul or Skulptur Projekte Munster 08 have earned them leading awards including the Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof’s Preis der Nationalgaleirie für Junge Kunst, solidly establishing their presence on the international art scene. Based in Berlin, they are currently working as artists/ curators for the Danish and Norwegian pavilions at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, where for the first time in history two countries will put forth a joint project.

Trying to Remember What We Once Wanted to Forget. The exhibition.

Elmgreen & Dragset, in close cooperation with their curator, have developed a project for MUSAC that tackles the fine line between the personal and the collective, exploring the problems we face when our voracious public sphere encroaches on the private. Trying to remember... attempts to involve the viewers, confronting them with the ambivalence between nostalgia and desire and forcing them to peer into a private or domestic environment from their standpoint in a public space.

Alongside their critical perspective on the system adopted from a position of otherness, the artists add a certain exercise in “looking back”. Trying to Remeber... builds on the discourse that underpinned This is the first day of my life at the Malmo Kunsthalle (2007), still pragmatically compromising, yet now bolstered by a degree of self-revisionism. The pair engages in a close examination of their lives so far, in order to construct an ongoing present, which they achieve by inquiring into the domesticated private space we all have in common. This backward gaze draws less on irony and humour than their previous work, being more openly driven by existential angst. The artists focus on our most intimate doubts, including miscommunication, loneliness, isolation, the morning after, the trials and tribulations we face in constructing our identities, or our dashed hopes and fears. These are the themes that the artists are concerned with in their artistic maturity, certainly present in their previous work but now brought to the fore as the very core of their show. Trying to Remember... is haunted by a more cautious, reflexive approach to life, still touched by their trademark joie de vivre but more acutely aware of the hangover that living leaves us with – an enlightened gaze on how these individualistic times affect each individuals.

From the very first moment, Trying to Remember... sets out to destabilise the viewer. The point of entry forces the public to choose their own route through the show, deciding whether or not to step into the domestic spaces created specifically for the show that house each installation. The artists have created a collective transition space that confronts aspects of intimacy (the small domestic structures that hold each installation) with the collective idea of private space, where architecture and domestic space become the guiding vector from one episode to the next, combining microhistories that define the way we see ourselves within the community. This is an idea that runs through the entire exhibition, made up of twelve installations, many of which were conceived and produced specifically for the show, alongside previous works, displayed in line with the artists and curator’s overall approach to the project. Stepping into the exhibition space is to plunge into a succession of situations where a set of architectural and sensorial factors generate a confrontation between the public and the private. Hotel corridors with vestiges of an event; a courtyard where a party really did take place as part of the exhibition project, with the leftovers becoming a part of the artwork itself; domestic interiors where we become entangled in the owners’ intimate relationships; children gripped by a fear of the unknown; rooms haunted by solitary beings whose sense of loneliness is not soothed by digital communication overkill; dreams and desires that make the trappings of our daily lives fade away in our yearning for the other; chambers where a given time is the same in different places; labyrinths crammed with hundreds of images of our past, where we become engulfed in a surge of information and loose our sense of past and present; or two lovers suspended in the vacuum in an endless search for the “other” – all force us to question our experience of who we are, what has happened and where we stand.

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Marina Núñez
FIN (END)

Curator: Tania Pardo
Venue: Halls 2.1 and 2.2

On 31 January 2009, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC) is to unveil an exhibition by the title of FIN (END), showing the work of Marina Nuñez (Palencia, 1966). This site-specific project including over 20 videos and a large visual installation approaches post-humanisation, taken as the process whereby we transcend certain features of our humanity that have become obsolete. Resorting to an aesthetic that echoes the episodes by John Bosch, Núñez plunges the viewer into a world of desolation haunted by eerie ghosts, micro-organisms and lifeless seas – hellish scenes that project us into a post-human future; i.e., what will be left once it’s all over. The show reflects upon the death of what is human and the idea of the body’s transformation and collapse.

Marina Núñez (Palencia, 1966) is possibly one of Spain’s most acclaimed artists. From the very outset, her work took a bold ideological stance in terms of gender discourse and representations of the female body, later evolving towards her current concern regarding the human body’s progressive mutation and ultimate annihilation. In the artist’s own words: “Hysterical women, Medusas, mummies, she-monsters and cyborgs, who belong to that crowd of weirdos, are clearly redundant; an added twist of madness, perversity, disease or monstrosity for women in general, who are already defined as having limited and murky brains and grotesque and unrestrained bodies. In this sense, they attempt to expose the extent to which the female body and identity are abnormal under the male gaze that constructed them. Representing the monstrous, the discordant, the repudiated is, as Remo Bodei explained, a way of denouncing the violence that excludes some from the canon, which under the appearance of beauty and harmlessness hides the implacable persecution of all that is different.”

FIN. The exhibition
The show’s title references the idea that the human body is seen today as an organism reconstructed via mechanical or electronic devices, transplants, xenotransplants, compounded by all sorts of chemical substances or even budding genetic therapies, which make it increasingly difficult to uphold an image of bodily integrity. Marina Nuñez thus underlines how the image of a body-collage is imposed: hybrid, unstable, metaphorical, artificially viable, where boundaries (with the world, with other beings) cease to be unbreachable to become porous and fuzzy.

The exhibition FIN is structured around four main axes, connecting the five pieces on display. The transition through FIN begins with a projection, on four plasma screens, of mutated skulls in black glass that return distorted reflections of different gazes, challenging the viewer to reflect upon the fragile limit between normality and deformity.
Next, the video Ocaso shows a seascape revealing certain iconic features linked to the myth of nature as Utopia. Body parts sealed in glass columns or test tubes spread out in neat lines, forming and endless cemetery. Further exploring the theme of this post-human ruin, we move into the following installation, made up of eight video projections where Vitruvius or Leonardo’s Man, transformed into an anomalous being, is presented in flames. Thus, the ideal man, warped into a monster by the artist, is seen in flames, as a symbol of the demise of an ideal model.
The fourth installation is a set of eleven video projections, where again we see misshaped human skulls, fossilised and eroded by the passage of time. Inside them we find latent microorganisms squiggling around - since even in our obliteration we can sense a new and different form of life emerging. Peering into these translucent lumps of rock, viewers are intrigued by their discovery, as if they had come across vestiges of a future past. The exhibition closes with a large piece conceived as a visual installation and executed in digital 3D, where a massive landscape based on John Bosch’s paintings plunges the viewer into a universe where humans are no longer present and cities lie in ruins, bearing witness of our devastation.

As a whole, FIN resorts to an aesthetic combining Play Station creatures on the one hand with echoes of Classical and particularly Baroque painting on the other in order to spark off an interrogation on the human body and the post-human age. This gaze cast back on the past from a grim future ultimately leaves us facing up to our very present.

If literature and film have inquired into dehumanisation in the context of science fiction, this exhibition lures us into a universe of ambiguous recreations, voiced in a language neighbouring the organic that explores a whole range of issues on being human. In the artist’s own words: “New technologies, particularly IT and biotech, are driving humans towards an unprecedented crossroad of change. Sensory organs extended into space and time thanks to the web, prosthetics and genetic alterations that transform us into hybrid and artificially viable beings, a new paradigm that defines us as information flows... some of the clichés of science fiction are amongst today’s realities. But despite the fact that all these films have made us familiar with the vision of spectacular physiological changes that reconfigure the human body, they seldom enter into speculation on what these changes will imply –are already implying– in terms of our subjectivity. Swinging between technophilia and technophobia, between desire and fear, we are building up a new way of understanding our identity, which some philosophers and historians have come to label posthuman”.

FIN. The book
The exhibition is accompanied by a book that is to be taken as a key component of Marina Núñez’s project for MUSAC. Designed by ACTAR, it will include four stories by Estrella de Diego (Contemporary Art Professor at the Complutense University of Madrid), Enrique Marty (artist), Rafael Doctor (MUSAC Director) and Pilar Adón (author), each related to the four major pieces that make up FIN.

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Kirstine Roepstorff
The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer

Curators: Solvej Helweg Ovesen and Agustín Pérez Rubio
Coordinator: Helena López Camacho
Venue: Halls 3.1 and 3.2

MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, is to host the first major exhibition in Spain for Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff. Under the title The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer, the show brings together over 50 works produced between 2005 and 2008 in a range of formats (collage, painting, sculpture and mixed media), in an attempt to provide an overview of the artist’s prolific production. Roepstorff explores a range of techniques, but finds a common root in the use of collage as the starting point of her creative process. Alongside her more widely acclaimed works, MUSAC presents the artist’s most recent production, including the installation Quiet Theatre (2008), produced in collaboration with Copenhagen’s U-TURN Quadrienial for Contemporary Art. The piece brings a new approach to collage techniques, placing them within a theatrical and performative context.

The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer is the title of Kirstine Roepstorff’s first solo show in Spain, hosted by MUSAC and showing a range of works that differ in material from collage to mechanical theatre. The manifold topics of the visually mesmerising and yet politically engaging collages in this exhibit all merge in the spectacle of a mechanical theatre, Quiet Theatre. The latter can also be described as both a linguistic and physical sculpture.

The title of the exhibit, The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer, focuses on the question of how inner universes (individual worldviews) fit into, and emerge out of other, outer universes or worldviews. This concern evolves from a fundamental urge in Roepstorff’s work to explore how to contain the presence of infinity, the unknown as an individual; how to navigate through several forces of political influence, desire, melancholy and love. The title can also be understood in terms of this being an exhibition tracking down an artist’s abstract voicing of how her mind makes sense and non-sense of contemporary belief systems and media stories versus her own. Adding another dimension to the title, the piece All possible Experiences, (2006), which previously has been part of an installation by a similar title, The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer, this work might capture one overall idea behind the show; how an inner universe (voice, sound) encompasses the many outer ones.

As the Dada collages by Hanna Höch of the early 20th century, Roepstorff’s collages transform media narratives and images in a blend with other profane materials into critical tales on the contemporary political world order and its defeats. The collages in both artists’ cases allow the viewer to gaze through a window (the collage) to see how reality both optimistically could look in the future as well as to how reality has come to look today from a genuine feminist perspective. Thus the ability to implode past, presence and future as well as to allegorically connect the everyday materials as experiences with the universal is a characteristic for these two artistic positions divided by almost a century.
It has been said about Kirstine Roepstorff that her artistic oeuvre can be captured as a “One Woman Revolution” and in many ways this artist does have her own mission in the world, which is dedicated to the visual re-negotiation and ‘balancing’ of existing power relations. If the collage already in the last century marked the beginning of deconstruction and appropriation in art, Roepstorff’s work sparks this tradition even further as she wittily, yet deadly serious in her critique, joggles with metaphors of capitalism, progress, loss, excess and eventually the desire of (re-)defining the order of things in her rich series of collages.

In The Inner Sound That Kills the Outer, a major representation of these collage series, will be on display in MUSAC in a carefully selected constellation. The visitor will encounter the new series Deep Fall (2008), which includes collages that host male figures in devious action inside a wilderness of stems and bushes. The greenery is a recurrent theme in Roepstorff’s work, which she describes as the “in between” - an indispensable image of humans’ lifelong challenge of navigation-. On display is also the legendary series Rocks (referring to both jewellery and stone) in which the artist alters material hierarchies and value in a skilful symbolic language; and Mystic Harbour, which portrays progressing ships going nowhere as a metaphor of global economical growth and its failed circuits. As a socio-political commentary to the ambitious striving for ever more education and progress (reading the news) she has teased a run of front pages of the Herald Tribune, Where the World Wander – the Road to Excelsior (2006).

Throughout her collage work (including many hours spent gluing in the studio) Roepstorff has repeatedly referred to and applied a cast of imaginative, however visually real characters. The Moment Man, Stop Lady, The Eel of Unfortune and Balance are all part of the cast and in spite of their seemingly individual characters, they embody one ongoing and intrinsic discourse in the work generated by the artist. Now lately in her new endeavour of ‘leaving’ two- dimensional collages for three-dimensional theatre, she states that this move has liberated the content of her collage work in space – hence we are now arriving at the mechanical theatre, Quiet Theatre.

Quiet Theatre, 2008
In the theatre installation, Quiet Theatre (2008), which is permanently running in the exhibit, the word ‘quiet’ refers to the fact that there is no live acting on stage although it is a theatre. On stage is, instead, a 4.5 meters tall mechanical sculpture, skilfully lit, generating a strong audiovisual experience representing the previously mentioned characters from the collages. Acting in cohesion with the moving sculpture is an audio drama between two voices named “Image” and “Space”. The dialogue entangles one discursive position fond of defining his surroundings, Image, and one ever so enthusiastically dissolving definitions (of love, of naming, of matter), Space. Of the script written by Kirstine Roepstorff, it has been said: “The most fascinating thing about Kirstine’s writing is that she uses language like a sculptor; her words are physical: they conjure sensation, settle in the mind as corporeal experience”, Lost In Translation, Patricia Ellis, 2008

“Stop Lady! Stop your galloping illusions” or “Think the way of water” and the mere 3D sensation of the sound-scape are examples of this. The rest has to be experienced.
The run of “Quite Theatre” takes 36 minutes, and at MUSAC the public will hear a dubbed version of the English-language original.

Kirstine Ropestorff: the book
MUSAC will be launching the fist major book devoted to Kirstine Roepstorff’s work alongside her exhibition at the museum. Jointly edited by Swiss publishing house JR Ringier, the book will review her entire career, with 150 illustrations backing up texts and essays by a number of contributors. Andreas Schlaegel, Angela Rosenberg and Patricia Ellis will approach the artist’s work from a historical/analytical perspective, while exhibition curators Solvej Helveg Oyesen and Agustín Pérez Rubio will delve into her thoughts and creative processes in the course of a light-hearted interview.

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Mateo López
Deriva (Adrift)

Curator: Tania Pardo
Laboratorio 987, MUSAC
31 January – March 2009

Colombian artist Mateo López (Bogotá, 1978), a leading figure in his generation, is to hold his first solo exhibition in Spain at MUSAC’s Laboratorio 987. Under the title of Deriva, the artist will showcase a complex installation combining drawings, sculpture, photographs, found objects, models... Deriva follows up on one of his major works to date, Diario de Motocicleta (Motorcycle Diary), where he crossed Colombia on a motorbike, later compiling an installation of drawings, diaries, survey maps, photographs and sculptures that draw the viewer into his journey as an active witness. For Deriva, Mateo López will again draw up an installation out of the body of material used in his publishing project by the same name, which shall also be on display. Thus, the exhibition aims to capture the artists’ thinking regarding his own creative process.

In September 2008, Mateo López began work on Deriva, a book for the Trienal Poligráfica de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Polygraphic Triennial). The installation on display at MUSAC, by the same name, draws on and documents the entire process involved in developing the book, including the full range of materials used: models, objects, reading lists, quotes, photographs, etc. Thus, the artist’s installations are ultimately the outcome of a research and working process that gradually connects one idea to the next. Indeed, this is not Mateo López’s first experience in temporising space – he had carried out a similar exercise in Diario de Motocicleta, where he transferred all the mementoes of his trip into a gallery space, decontextualising his own physical experience.

Likewise, Deriva reflects the artist’s thoughts regarding his own creative process. The show brings together different ideas that, once interrelated, take shape in certain objects, from drawings to sculpture, photographs, etc. It is precisely this network of ideas materialised as works of art that echoes Guattari and Deleuze’s idea of the Rhizome, and ties in with the artist’s own literary references: Cortázar, Borges or Paul Auster.

The world of Mateo López is a universe of anecdotes and experiences for which the exhibition provides a logbook or scrap folder open to be shared by the viewer. Most of the drawings and sculptures on display reveal the manual gesture that establishes the connection between the image and its representation. In other words, his objects are often representations of reality, as Jaime Cerón explains, “When we discover the fact that a dollar bill is actually a drawing, we are struck by a sense of bewilderment that tends to affect not only our relationship with the work, but also our understanding and experience of the object it refers to (...) The target that his work pursues is the very instrument that sustains the representation, both in art and in the world, generating a paradox whereby what is true is revealed as false and what is false as true”.

The exhibition is therefore a 3-D display of the theme and contents of the book Deriva. Likewise, building on the idea behind his Taller Portátil No. 25 (Portable Workshop #25), the artist will not only recreate all the material related to the book Deriva at Laboratorio 987, but will also set up a bookbinder’s workshop, leaving the objects “adrift” in the workshop, thus playing on the exhibition title.

Mateo López, biography
Mateo López holds a degree in Visual Arts by the Universidad de Los Andes (Bogotá) and in Architecture by the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, also in Bogotá. He has held major solo exhibitions in both galleries and institutions throughout Latin America, the most relevant being: Adentro y en medio (Galería Casas Riegner, Bogotá, 2006) or El ideal de lo práctico (Centro Cultural de la Universidad de Salamanca, Bogotá, 2006). He has also taken part in a number of international group exhibitions, including Doméstico’08 (Madrid, 2008); Viajes, at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid (July 2008); the 9th Cuenca International Biennial (Cuenca, Ecuador, 2007); and Procesos de Intercambio y Conversión at the Academy of Fine Arts, Bogotá (2006). He has also developed curatorial projects for including Cuadernos Azules or Ideografismos, both with the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá. In 2003 he received the 4th University Visual Arts Exhibition Award granted by the Bogotá District Culture and Tourism Centre.

Laboratorio 987, MUSAC’s project space, is an annexed venue that develops its own independent programme. The first artist to show in here was Silvia Prada (Ponferrada, 1969), with her site-specific project Hot or Not, between April and May 2005. Next came a video project by Fikret Atay (Batman, Turkey, 1976) under the title Sonidos Lejanos / Distant Sounds. In September and October 2005 Abigail Lazkoz (Bilbao, 1972) developed her project Esconde la mano (Hide your hand). Ryan McGinley (New Jersey, USA, 1978), held a photo exhibition Between us / Entre nosotros, in November and December 2005 while Wilfredo Prieto (Santi Spíritus, Cuba, 1977) projected his installation Mucho ruido y pocas nueces II (Much ado about Nothing II) between December 2005 and March 2006. Monika Sosnoswka (Ryki, Poland, 1972) took over in March 2006 with her installation Untitled. Philipp Fröhlich (Schweinfurt, Germany, 1975) authored a painting exhibition Exvoto. Where is Nikki Black? from September to November 2006. Pauline Fondevila (Le Havre, France, 1972) showed her installation November Song between November 2006 and January 2007. Clare E. Rojas (Ohio, USA, 1976) exhibited Sympathetic Magic from January to March 2007. Later, Marc Vives (Barcelona, 1978) + David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980) carried out their Imágenes del Fin del Mundo (Images from the End of the World) from March to May 2007. In May 2007 Joao Maria Gusmao (Lisbon, 1979) + Pedro Paiva (Lisbon, 1977) carried out a site-specific project. In July 2007, Matías Duville (Buenos Aires, 1974) set up his picture installation Cover, which remained on show until September 2007.

Ivan Grubanov (Serbia, 1976) and Ángel de la Rubia (Oviedo, 1979) opened the new season in March 2008 with Después de todo / Afterall. In May 2008 US artist Dan Attoe (Bremerton, Washington, 1975) took over with American Dreams. Nicolás Paris (Bogotá, Colombia, 1977) and Ignacio Uriarte (Krefeld, Germany, 1973) held Tan sencillo como una línea o un círculo / As simple as a Line or a Circle from July to September 2008. By the title of Gallo rojo, gallo negro / Red Cock, Black Cock, Antonio Ballester held a compelling exhibition of drawings from 27 September to 16 November 2008 and Regina de Miguel showed her models between 21 November 2008 and 11 January 2009 under the title El aire aún no respirado / The air not yet breathed.

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Point d’ironie

Curator: María Inés Rodríguez
Coordinator: Carlos Ordás
For further information http://www.pointdironie.com

Opening 31 January, MUSAC’s Showcases is to host a project focused on Point d’ironie, a publication established in 1997 by French fashion designer agnès b. in cooperation with Swiss curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and French artist Christian Boltanski. Roughly four times a year, an artist is granted full control of the Point D’Ironie paperscape in a hybrid publishing project: part magazine, part poster. The only factor that remains unchanged from one edition to the next is the format: an 8-page tabloid that each artist is free to approach as they wish. For the MUSAC Showcases, Point d’ironie curator and editor María Inés Rodríguez has designed an installation where an entire set of magazines, from the first issue to the most recent, is used to cover the available space. In addition, 10,000 copies of the magazine, carrying the works of Robert Crumb, Hugues Reip and Melanie Counsell, amongst others, will be circulated free.

Point d’ironie is not a magazine about art, but rather a space to be intervened by each guest: artists, architects, musicians, film directors, etc. The idea is to offer free artworks in print format in an age of digital communications, allowing users touch, read (or not), show, frame, file or discard them – or even use them as wrapping paper. Ultimately, the format is intended to appear and vanish just as easily. The publication takes its name from the point d’ironie punctuation mark invented in the late 19th century by French author Alcanter de Brahm to be used at the end of sentences (in the same way as an exclamation or question mark) to indicate ironic passages in the text. Hopefully some day it will be included on our keyboards.

The magazine is circulated free of charge around the world. Between 150,000 and 200,000 copies of each issue are handed out at agnès b. outlets (in Europe, Asia and the US), as well as at museums, cafés, galleries, art schools and other institutions. In artist Christian Boltanski’s own words, “The publication’s broad distribution undermines the idea of the ‘original’. Traditionally, if you owned a photograph, there were at the most 50 copies of it, so it acquired an economic value. Point d’ironie’s mass distribution destroys that value and allows a student or housewife to hang it on the wall. Therein lies an important element of the publication’s originality, since this idea of mass distribution is pretty rate in the art world, where everything works in small circles.”

Point d’ironie was born in 1997 out of a conversation between designer agnès b., artist Christian Boltanski and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is currently based in London as Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International projects at the Serpentine Gallery.
The long list of creators who have contributed to Point d’ironie includes filmmakers Jonas Mekas and Harmony Korine, visual artists Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, Gilbert & George, Yoko Ono and Damien Hirst; photographer Martin Parr; illustrator Robert Crumb and architect Yona Friedman, amongst others.


Image: Elmgreen & Dragset, Boy Scout, 2008. Aluminium structure, matresses and lights 200 x 90 x 200. Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner. Photo by Anders Sune Berg

La Comunicateca
Paula Álvarez
Izaskun Sebastián
prensa@musac.es

MUSAC - Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León
Avda. de los Reyes Leoneses, 24. 24008 León - Spain
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