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2/10/2002

Mona Hatoum, Manuel Vilarino

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea CGAC, Santiago de Compostela

Mona Hatoum

Curator: Alberto Martín
Opening: Thursday 3 October. 7 p.m.

Mona Hatoum presents at Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC), in Spain, a selection of pieces made during the last decade. She will bring around thirty pieces including photography, video, installation and sculpture. For this exhibition she has produced several pieces such as Grater Divide, 2002 or Cage a deux, 2002. The exhibition has been co-produced by Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) and Centro de Arte de Salamanca (CASA), where Mona Hatoum exhibition was showed between July 10 and September 1, 2002. Each venue shows different pieces in relation to the museum´s architecture (CGAC is a contemporary art museum designed by Pritzker Prize architect Alvaro Siza).

Mona Hatoum (Beirut, 1952) was born in Lebanon. She grew up with her Palestinian family, exiled in Lebanon after 1948. "My parents were never able to obtain Lebanese identity cards. It was one way of discouraging them from integrating into the Lebanese situation. Instead, and for reasons that I won't go into, my family became naturalized British, so I've had a British passport since I was born. I grew up in Beirut in a family that had suffered a tremendous loss and existed with a sense of dislocation. When I went to London in 1975 for what was meant to be a brief visit, I got stranded there because the war broke out in Lebanon, and that created another kind of dislocation. How that manifests itself in my work is a sense of disjunction". (from an interview with Janine Antoni, Spring 1998).

Mona Hatoum has exhibited her pieces at Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris). She has been selected to participate at Documenta 11, Kassel (Until September 15th, 2002).

The catalogue of the exhibiton includes texts by Tamar Garb, Janine Antoni and Jo Glencross.

Manuel Vilariño
3 October - January 2003
Curator: Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego
Opening: Thursday 3 October. 7 p.m.

CGAC presents a solo show of Manuel Vilariño (A Coruña, 1952), photographer based in Spain. It includes pieces from series as Ahorcados, Emboscadura, Crucifixiones and El ángel necesario as well as site-specific installations for CGAC.

The oeuvre of photographer Manuel Vilariño (Spain, 1952) verges on the borders between life and death. His photographs symbolise the mysterious union that exists in matter: the link between annihilation and life forever unfolding in existence. Fío e sombra (Thread and Shadow) speaks of vital experience as an indissoluble totality in which beings are confronted with the dark and the unknown, on the limits between continuity and discontinuity, absence and presence. This is a tribute to the fragile beauty of the world in which, like a breath of air or a thread, life comes and goes and at once seems to have disappeared. It is also the revelation of the desire to belong to an infinite universe as a testimony of the divine. An open totality or an element of mystery that is the sum and source of all forms of generation and destruction and corresponds to what we call sacred.
The constant presence of animals in the images by Manuel Vilariño is a poetic reference to the sense of precariousness and heightened awareness of one who has been in close contact with this mysterious source in an elementary way. Animals are the thresholds to this source of panic; like reptiles, they inhabit the entrails of the earth and like birds, aspire to union with the stars. Creatures are, ultimately, the metaphor for the passion of an existence that dwells in crossroads, crosses, duration and transcendence.
This sense of our mortal dependency, together with the unbounded love for the brutal jet of life, expresses the poetry, the destructive force and the terrible tenderness of the tragic art of Manuel Vilariño.

Image: Mona Hatum, Webbed, 2002, steel, 128,5 x 195,5 x 93,5 cm

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