calendario eventi  :: 

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3/12/2008

Crisis. Against appearances

Angels Barcelona, Barcelona

Crisis. Against appearances, addresses the fundamental proposals of our gallery project. Departing from a certain skepticism, the selected works are based on practices that criticize artistic mediums, the representation of reality and the languages which, from the art world and the media, codify our society. The art object thus takes on a double role as both a social product integrated into a productive medium, such as the arts, and a platform for criticizing these productions.

Strategically using the ambiguity of images and sounds, the works question structural systems such as the control of the imaginary, information and environmental sound, the use and production of violence, the control of knowledge, the rigidity of certain categories or the excess of external stimuli. The exhibition invites the observer to construct dialogues among the artists, as well as between the artists and the mediums they work in.

Mark Geffriaud | Herbarium
Slide projector and pages framed in Plexiglas.
Herbarium is a reflection on the institutionalization of culture and the task of cataloguing knowledge. Referencing what could be considered a paradigmatic example of an archive: the herbarium, the spectator’s attention is directed towards the back side of illuminated pages. In this manner, the work emphasizes what selection processes and hierarchies devalue: all those things that disappear for lacking institutional worth. A compartmentalized vision of culture is juxtaposed with the artistic intention to dissolve the borders between categories.

Ion Grigorescu | The work or the labour
Color photographs, 100 x 75 cm.
Grigorescu presents a series of photographs that reflect on the place occupied by both the artist and his work in the social fabric. Making us doubt whether they are self-portraits or simulacra, the scenes present a creative gesture that may be mistaken for the work conditions of a laborer. This work is the result of a way of understanding what it means to be an artist: a fact which “hangs not on talent but on the pleasure to integrate in an ideology, or to usurp one.”

Tom Johnson | Study to become “twelve”
Drawings on paper, 35 x 50 cm.
A minimalist composer, Johnson works with simple formulas, limited scales and reduced material sounds. The particularity of his composing is found in the use of sequences based on logical series, frequently employing permutations or mathematical sequences. His drawings abandon the linearity of the pentagram in favor of a spatial disposition of sound. These mathematical scores correspond to previous studies for composition and give us access to the logical systems that sustain Johnson’s music.

Jan Kopp | Parabole
Polyesterene and plaster. 400 x 600 cm.
Parabole is a hybrid that emerges from the architectural form of an amphitheater, whose movement evokes the structure of a parabolic antenna. The form refers to two objects—one archaic and one contemporary—that are used for the transmission of information, whether visual or imaginary. The work therefore presents a metaphor on the capture of information. With a sculpture that not is a sculpture but a cadaver (a structure that is more provisional than solid), the artist presents himself as a “bricoleur” , or handyman, and solicits the spectator to complete the empty structure as well as the temporal chain of disuse and dysfunction of an apparently unfinished object.

Molleindustria | The free culture game
Videogame in Flash. Projector and wireless mouse.
The free culture game is a game about the conflict between free culture and copyright, portraying a critical vision of the of the videogame format. The goal of the game is to create and defend the circulation of knowledge. Obliging the player to distribute knowledge before it is absorbed by copyright, the game not only questions up to what point it is possible to claim authorship of ideas but also alludes to those ideas that become the dominion of the market, in order to reactivate them via knowledge.

Vacca | F. & F. en F drama (romàntic)
3-channel sound installation.
Vacca’s sound installation presents fragmented sounds which we can never access completely, given that it is impossible to listen to them all at once. Among the diverse sound sequences (all in the key of F), fragments from F. Schubert and F. Chopin make appearances. This act parodies postmodern appropriation with an atypical romantic content that does not fit into the spectacle of the cultural scene.

Image: Mark Geffriaud, Herbarium, 2 slide projectors and pages framed in Plexiglas.

Opening : 04.12.08, 20h.

angels barcelona
c. Pintor Fortuny, 27
tues - sat: 12 > 14h ; 17 > 20:30 h.

+ espai 2
c. dels Àngels, 16
tues - sat : 17 > 20 h

stampa

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