Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

The multidisciplinary practice of Simone Fattal (Damascus, 1942) conceptualizes time as an elastic entity that transcends the distinctions between past, present, and future. Her work draws from mythology, spanning from ancient Egypt to Sunni mysticism and Greco-Roman tradition, creating archetypal figures that integrate historical narratives into the present.

Fattal’s work, predominantly sculptural, unfolds in a multicultural and nomadic space distinct from official history. This space transports the viewer to a “historical place” of an almost archaeological, multilingual, and polytheistic nature, which nevertheless exists and manifests in the present.

Through mediums such as sculpture, painting, and photography, Fattal explores the boundaries of figuration, inspired by historical figures from the Mediterranean, creating a cosmogony of resilient bodies and architectures. Her sculptures, made of bronze, clay, or stoneware, evoke literature, Sumerian tales, Arab epics, and Sufi poetry. Angels, centaurs, heroes, and gods mingle with architectural ruins and figures of fruits and animals, alluding to the loss of historical sites such as Palmyra or Aleppo. These works, timeless and simultaneously archaic and modern, reflect on humanity and its place in the world and history.

Fattal has been awarded the Julio González International Prize 2024 for her contribution to contemporary art. To mark the occasion, IVAM will organize an exhibition curated by Nuria Enguita and Rafael Barber, which will review the main lines of work of this Franco-Lebanese artist. A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, including texts by the curators and contributions from professionals such as Jacqueline Burckhardt and Omar Kholeif.

Simone Fattal, born in Syria in 1942 and raised in Lebanon, studied philosophy in Paris and established herself as an artist in Beirut. After the Lebanese Civil War, she moved to California, where she founded The Post-Apollo Press. She resumed her artistic practice in 1988 at the San Francisco Art Institute, focusing on sculpture and ceramics. Her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned institutions such as MOMA PS1 (2019); Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne (2019); Punta Della Dogana, Pinault Collection, Venice (2019); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2020); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2021); ICA Milan, Milan (2021); La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); 16th Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2022); 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2022); TBA21 Academy, Ocean Space, Venice (2023); Portikus, Frankfurt (2023); Secession, Vienna (2024).

Juana Francés (Alicante, 1924 – Madrid, 1990) began her artistic activity in the 1950s, when the first symptoms of artistic renewal started to appear in Francoist Spain. Establishing connections with the avant-garde circles that gathered in Madrid, Juana Francés was the only female member of El Paso, a group born under the influence of American Abstract Expressionism and its gestural and material violence. However, she left the group in 1957, precisely because of the contempt for her art and her condition as a woman shown by some of the other members at a time when art was still an area dominated by men.

Until 1960, Juana produced works in which she aggregated different textures, sober colours (blacks, whites and earth tones) and new materials like river sands. From 1963, and for nearly twenty years, she produced her series El hombre y la ciudad (Man and the City), a depiction of a stifling and distressing human environment resulting from the growing industrialisation and economic development in urban Spain after the application of the Stabilisation Plan of 1959. Later, in the 1980s, the artist returned to abstraction. Between 1986 and 1990, the year of her death, she produced her series Fondos Submarinos (Submarine Depths), Cometas (Comets) and Escudos (Shields), where she experimented once more with material and gesture in an attempt to transfer movement to the support, drawing inspiration from the cosmos or the depths of the sea, and using the circle and rectangle as principal motifs.

This exhibition attempts to break down and delve into the different fragments of Juana Francés’s artistic career not only through her own words and writings, but also through the study and monitoring of her creative process. It provides, therefore, a more intimate and personal view of the artist, while recovering the memory of her exhibitions, framing her work in the time table of our own history.

The exhibition at the IVAM Centre Julio González is the culmination of the centenary of the artist’s birth and concludes the itinerancy of this ambitious exhibition after its presentation at the IVAM in Alcoi and the Centro Niemeyer in Avilés. Furthermore, this new show devoted to the work of Juana Francés will offer the opportunity to enjoy artworks that have not been exhibited before.

This exhibition explores the development of the photographic image of Nobosudru, a Mangbetu woman, taken in the north-eastern part of the Congo by G. Specht and L. Poirier, who were responsible for the photographic and cinematographic shots of the famous Citroën automobile crossing known as La Croisière Noire (1924-1925). Directed by G. M. Haardt and L. Audoin-Dubreuil, it crossed Africa from Algeria to Cape Town. Very soon, the profile image of Nobosudru with her characteristic headdress, which was only a status marker but was falsely taken as an ethnic sign of all Mangbetu women, became an icon of Black Africa. The use of this image in the most diverse practices and social contexts, as well as its different material supports, all of which are present in the exhibition, led to its formal and semantic mutation from the 1920s to the present day.

The exhibition allows the visitor to see a wealth of documentation from numerous archives and museums, mainly European, as well as private collections: the expedition’s memory albums, the film of La Croisière Noire and the posters in various languages advertising it, the scientific and popular books in which the image was reproduced, the advertising of consumer products, fashion magazines, decorative painting and sculpture, jewellery and costume jewellery, and so on. Uses of this image underpinned by an exoticist point of view in keeping with the colonial period. But this exhibition also shows the paradox that this same image has had an anti-racist political meaning in other contexts, as shown by its propagandistic use in documents of cultural resistance or in some appropriations from contemporary art, including film. That this colonial image continues its journey, when criticism of colonialism abounds, is perhaps explained by an ambivalent attitude that mixes in varying proportions both rejection of that period and a certain melancholy. Through condensation and displacement, mechanisms typical of dreamlike elaboration, Nobosudru remains a symbolic field where, today as yesterday, the expressions of different post-memories compete.

Through a case analysis, this exhibition is situated at the crossroads of different disciplines: visual anthropology, the history of political representations, aesthetics and the pragmatic theory of the image.

This innovative exhibition will juxtapose the lives and work of two of the most important and influential practitioners in the history of photography. Showcasing more than 150 rare vintage prints, the exhibition will span the entire career of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron – who worked 100 years apartand include examples of both their best known and less familiar work. In ways that tantalisingly intersect and diverge, portraiture was fundamentally imortant to the artistic project of both women. This exhibition will explore the idea that Woodman and Cameron share an engagement with portraiture as a ‘dream space’. The title makes reference to the idea that these photgraphic portraits are not intended to mimic reality, but conjure notions of imagination, beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling. Considering both artists in a different light, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In will propose new ways of appreciating and thinking about the artists, portraiture and the relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practices.

The exhibiton will be accompanied by a catalogue, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, by curator Madgalene Keaney, including essays and contributions from the curator of the Woodman Family Foundation, Katarina Jerinic, and leading photography historian, Helen Ennis.