Born in Aley (Lebanon) in 1928, Aref El Rayess started to paint at the age of eleven. In 1948, he had his first exhibition in Beirut. From 1948 to 1957, El Rayess travelled between Senegal and Paris, where he started art at the Academy of Fine Arts and trained in the studios of Fernand Léger and André Lhôte, among others. He returned to Lebanon in 1957, and in 1959 was offered a grant to study in Italy. In 1963, the Lebanese government commissioned two sculptures from him to represent Lebanon at the World’s Fair in New York. In 1967, he returned once more to Lebanon, a country then greatly affected by events in the Arab world. He was a founder member of the Department of Fine Arts at the Lebanese university. From then on, El Rayess organised, attended and took part in conferences and exhibitions on politics and art in the Arab world. In 1975, he was invited to Algeria, where he made a series of drawings on the Lebanese civil war, and in 1978, he took part in the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine. During that period, he started to work in Saudi Arabia, where he produced some 13 sculptures in the cities of Jeddah, Tabuk and Riyadh. He lived in Jeddah until 1987, and some years later, in 1992, he returned to Aley in Lebanon, where he lived until his death in 2005.
Aref El Rayess is a fundamental figure in the Lebanese cultural panorama from the 1960s to the 1980s. In its paradoxes and singularity, its flashes and its blind alleys, the oeuvre of Aref El Rayess exemplifies an uncompromising modern artistic career that follows solely the “inner demand” of a concerned subject, more attentive and sympathetic to the political, social and cultural crises of his time than to the “isms” and expected sequences of the modern canon. Precociously talented and largely self-taught, extremely gifted and generally undisciplined, he was an entertaining and often caustic observer, fascinated in his adolescence by timeless “impressions of Africa” that accompanied him throughout his life. El Rayess’s formal career and work evolved mainly in cycles, reiterations and reminiscences, and in the various disciplines he fostered in his turn (drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, collage).
This exhibition is centred on the years 1958 to 1978, from El Rayess’s return to Beirut after his formative years in Senegal, Paris and Lebanon until the beginnings of the civil war (1975-1990). In many respects, his work of this period is a seismograph that records the frustrated desires and hopes of an era through heterogeneous formal expressions inspired by the insurrection of the Druze people (1958), the Algerian war of independence, the liberation struggles of the “Third World” and the war in Lebanon.
The collection from IVAM is organised using six chronological and themed blocks which explain, with their own voice, the art developed from the beginning of the 20th century to the modern day. Perhaps not everything is as it is (or was), but it is everything that exists. Stories of the present – and those that come from far away but are updated in our present- should be told as a polyphony of voices and from contexts that make us sharpen our critical eye regarding their construction and relevance.
Over six sessions, using six books, we will delve into the narrative actions that literature offers us and we will link them together, sometimes with simple gestures and sometimes with more complex choreography, with the IVAM collection. The worlds of fiction build reality; they are reflective mirrors or transparent windows, but they always tell us what we are, or what we are eager to become, from our previous experience and towards our future possibility of transforming ourselves. In these narrative gestures, traversed by stories and lives, we will slow down.
2002-2021: Forms of the contemporary
The most recent of the historical periods, with the closest relation to the present day, offers us several lines of thinking on prospective projects focusing on the early decades of the twenty-first century. With this in mind, we can tackle the many ways of imagining the revolt, the performative phenomenon of the protest as a sociological staging which also relates to the iconography of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. Actions and interventions in different contexts may mesh with some of the aims of feminist and queer activism, or the conflicts of globalism in its inequality, current forms of communication and the new awareness of crisis as a global phenomenon. Contemporary art is now postconceptual, its meanings are open, it has recuperated the document, narrative, and embodied practices through performance and the use of the word.
—The Most Secret Memory of Men (2023) by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Other Press
(La más recóndita memoria de los hombres, Mohamed Mbougar Sarrgar Sarr, Trans. Rubén Martín Giráldez. Ed. Anagrama).
This book might have exchanged places with Lumbung Stories in the previous decade, and vice versa. Both books are highly relevant to the present day, and deal with some of the aspects we have had to face in the first decades of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, we decided to leave this work of literature on literature for the last reading. This book looks at what it means to write and tell stories, at the reader’s reception of the written word, and of the hold it has on later writers: at the power of creative work on its maker, its audience or observers, and on anyone who thinks about it after reading it. An ambitious novel, a maze of stories, real and fictional characters, which won the Prix Goncourt in 2021 and proves that stories are not only still necessary; they also make us, individually and collectively.
The collection from IVAM is organised using six chronological and themed blocks which explain, with their own voice, the art developed from the beginning of the 20th century to the modern day. Perhaps not everything is as it is (or was), but it is everything that exists. Stories of the present – and those that come from far away but are updated in our present- should be told as a polyphony of voices and from contexts that make us sharpen our critical eye regarding their construction and relevance.
Over six sessions, using six books, we will delve into the narrative actions that literature offers us and we will link them together, sometimes with simple gestures and sometimes with more complex choreography, with the IVAM collection. The worlds of fiction build reality; they are reflective mirrors or transparent windows, but they always tell us what we are, or what we are eager to become, from our previous experience and towards our future possibility of transforming ourselves. In these narrative gestures, traversed by stories and lives, we will slow down.
1990-2001: Arts in a global world
This period saw the globalisation of contemporary art discourse and the phenomenon of the exhibition. In considering it, we must address the proliferation of exhibitions giving a voice to global “others”, and also take into account the conceptual shifts this necessarily led to in museum exhibitions. The complex demands of minority and subaltern majority identities must be taken into account, as well as the explosion of popular phenomena and the renewed discourses of feminism. New formats and materials also appeared, giving rise to hybrid categories of artistic genres in large installation formats. Abstraction also incorporated socially critical imagery and postcolonial discourses. The nineties also saw the birth of gender politics and many other non-hegemonic manifestations which began to permeate institutional collections and exhibitions.
—Lumbung Stories (2022), Azhari Aiyub et. al. ,Ed. harriet c. brown Incudes stories by Azhari Aiyub, Uxue Alberdi, Cristina Judar, Nesrine Khoury, Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil, Panashe Chigumadzi, Mithu Sanyal. Trans. Gemma Deza Guil, Miren Agur Meabe, Inmaculada Pérez Parra, Salvador Peña Martín, Laura Emilia Pacheco, Claudia Cabrera.Cassava Republic Press
(Relatos lumbung, VV AA. Edited by harriet c. brown. Ed. Consonni)
“Lumbung” was used in documenta 15 as a concept implementing collective work done for the common good. The Indonesian term refers to the communal barn, generally a rice barn, where the surplus harvest is stored to benefit the community. As a practice, it gives a name to the communal management of shared resources and community work. This book is an anthology of fictional stories written by plural voices (seven writers and a collective) in which the writers try to imagine the possibilities of collaborative practices from different places across the globe – in a world whose distances have shrunken over the past decades to a “click away”, and which now faces the greatest challenge in centuries; one which for the first time directly involves the survival of the planet itself.
The IVAM and the Centre de Perfeccionament Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía work together and they continue in this season 2022-2023 collaborating to bring the different arts and show the existing link between them, to all audiences.
With the purpose of disseminating artistic creation and making it more accessible, they have created a concert program that connects the different musical pieces they perform with the different exhibitions at IVAM.
With this collaboration, both institutions vindicate the need to work for an open, multifaceted and plural culture, as well as the importance of culture in the development of contemporary societies.
Presentation by Ellef Ellef Prestsæter, exhibition curator; Jacob Thage, director of the Museum Jorn; and Nuria Enguita, director of the IVAM, in the company of the artists Michael Murtaugh and Nicolas Malevé (Institute for Computational Vandalism) and Anna Sofie Mathiasen.
Open Creation and Its Enemies: Asger Jorn in situation presents the singular trajectory of the Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914–1973), a founding member of avant-garde movements such as Cobra and the Situationist International. While often acclaimed as an extraordinary painter, the exceptional range of Jorn’s practice merits a broader exploration. Open Creation and Its Enemies makes legible the experimental parameters of Jorn’s multifarious activities, charting his exits from, as well as his returns to, painting.
The exhibition includes commissioned works by Danish artist Anna Sofie Mathiasen as well as by the Institute for Computational Vandalism, who have been invited to engage with Jorn’s legacy from a contemporary perspective. Developed in close collaboration with the Museum Jorn in Silkeborg and curated by Norwegian art historian Ellef Prestsæter, the exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive book featuring translations of canonical and hitherto unpublished texts by Jorn as well as new perspectives on his practice.
Collaboration:
In 1946 Asger Jorn made an automatic drawing during a stay in Saxnäs, a town in Sweden and Sápmi (the land of the indigenous Sámi people). Using pen and transparent paper, he then traced a series of drawings from the original while also inviting artist friends to do the same. The result was a proliferation of interpretations, among them remarkable paintings as well as theoretical elaborations. For Jorn, the experiment demonstrated that an image is open to a multitude of interpretations depending on the “activity of the spectator, who in this way is no real spectator anymore.”
In this workshop the Institute for Computational Vandalism invites you to take part in a playful and collective exploration of the Saxnäs drawing, along with special guest
Collaboration:
Perhaps there are more transgender artists whose work is being exhibited, but perhaps this simply includes transgender art and artists within an existing mode of perception. What would it mean to see art in its totality from trans perspectives? Such a project might begin with a critique of the cis gaze, a way of seeing that orders the world through a standard model of the gendered subject, and treats anomalies to the standard model as exotic, humorous or dangerous. Perhaps we can develop another way of seeing, from the ways in which trans artists negotiate the cis gaze in their own practice.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born, New York-based writer and academic. She has published essays focused on the legacy of the Situationist International (SI) and the social and cultural changes produced by the irruption of information and communication technologies in our daily lives. Her books translated into Spanish are A Hacker Manifiesto (Alpha Decay), The Beach Beneath the Street (Hermida), Capital Is Dead (Holobionte) and Reverse Cowgirl (Caja Negra). Raving, her most recent book, has been published by Duke University Press.
Over centuries, humans learned how to maintain a continuous healthy diet by ‘extending’ the seasons—preserving, fermenting, salting, pickling, freezing, drying and curing foods. They were able to harvest in season, while eating the surplus out of season. But today this logic has been utterly disrupted. CLIMAVORE proposes how to eat as humans change climates. Or actually, how to live as humans in changing climates. As seasons creep, we recognise that eating less industrial meat protein, more locally grown produce, or more plant-based dishes is crucial – but perhaps not enough. Amidst an unfolding climate breakdown and stark warnings that humanity must drastically change ways of living to halt carbon emissions and biodiversity loss, while supporting ethical labour and social structures, this small talk explores ways to tackle the legacies of industrialism and extractivism. It aims to move beyond a carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan diet and think through CLIMAVORE as a future-defining way of eating, living, loving in a new epoch decentring humans on this planet.
Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop.
Yinka Esi Graves will be offering an immersive 90 minute workshop rooted in the flamenco rhythm of Buleria. Centering corporeal rhythm, grounding and improvisation, participants will experience the African Diasporic lens through which Yinka connects to Flamenco, in both how it is constructed and experienced. This re-observation opens a rarely explored perspective for people to first learn Flamenco through and for those more familiar with it, to further express themselves within it. Come wearing comfortable clothes and shoes, no need for flamenco shoes.
YINKA ESI GRAVES (London, 1983). Dance Artist whose work explores the links between flamenco and other forms of body expressions, particularly from a contemporary and African diaspora perspective. She graduated in Art History (Sussex 2005) and settled in Spain in 2009 to learn at the Amor de Dios Flamenco School in Madrid and then in Seville with teachers such as Yolanda Heredia, La Lupi and Andrés Marin. Yinka’s short pieces have been performed at Sadler’s Wells (UK), Gibney (New York), among other national and international venues. Yinka is currently a collaborator on Cuerpos Celestes (MAX Awards 2021 Finalist) by Chloé Brulé and Marco Vargas Cía, and Mailles by Dorothée Munyaneza. In 2023 Yinka premieres her first solo production:The Disappearing Act.
The collection from IVAM is organised using six chronological and themed blocks which explain, with their own voice, the art developed from the beginning of the 20th century to the modern day. Perhaps not everything is as it is (or was), but it is everything that exists. Stories of the present – and those that come from far away but are updated in our present- should be told as a polyphony of voices and from contexts that make us sharpen our critical eye regarding their construction and relevance.
Over six sessions, using six books, we will delve into the narrative actions that literature offers us and we will link them together, sometimes with simple gestures and sometimes with more complex choreography, with the IVAM collection. The worlds of fiction build reality; they are reflective mirrors or transparent windows, but they always tell us what we are, or what we are eager to become, from our previous experience and towards our future possibility of transforming ourselves. In these narrative gestures, traversed by stories and lives, we will slow down.
1977-1989: Transition and postmodernity
This period gave rise to some of the most daring phenomena of the late seventies, underlain by concepts which we can, almost academically, call “postmodern”. The IVAM itself functioned as a historically determined institutional threshold born of the thematically overexploited Spanish Transition, and a peculiar phenomenon specifically rooted in the fact of the Spanish Autonomic Regions. Certain artists appeared who intensified the use of photography as a concept rather than as a mere imprint or index, and we can trace the construction of new theories of the image, visual studies, and the new range of disciplines which, together with the artists themselves, were to reinterpret the role of different practices.
—Wittgenstein’s Mistress (1988) by David Markson, Dalgey Archive Press (La amante de Wittgenstein. Trans. Mariano Peyrou, Ed. Sexto Piso).
Wednesday 15 February, 2023, 18:00
Museums in this novel are spaces which should encourage iconoclasm, or even the practical application of Walter Benjamin’s famous statement, “There is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism”. The main character in this experimental, circular novel, which reiterates the possibility of narrative as a continuum between the essay and its inevitable mistakenness, recounts her memories and experiences. As she does so, the narrator Kate runs through the history of civilization and human culture, leading us into a trauma that cannot be avoided by literature, but can also not be overcome without it.
The IVAM and the Centre de Perfeccionament Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía work together and they continue in this season 2022-2023 collaborating to bring the different arts and show the existing link between them, to all audiences.
With the purpose of disseminating artistic creation and making it more accessible, they have created a concert program that connects the different musical pieces they perform with the different exhibitions at IVAM.
With this collaboration, both institutions vindicate the need to work for an open, multifaceted and plural culture, as well as the importance of culture in the development of contemporary societies.
The Poliglotia programme began in 2021 with the aim of creating a meeting space in the museum with a hybrid, intercultural perspective. A space to generate content by exchanging experience and other forms of knowledge. After our first laboratories with the Estudios Políglotas group, and the creation and programming of activities or analysis of the museum itself with Inventario, we now wish to propose a School for Diverse Knowledge, Escuela de Saberes Diversos.
The Escuela de Saberes Diversos is a kind of educational cycle intending to link forms of knowledge, interests and concerns of its members to the IVAM exhibition programme. The school’s initial idea is to bring the museum to people from different backgrounds interested in migratory processes and in acquiring experience in mediation from an intercultural perspective, and in expanding and shifting their attributes and potential via contact with other social and cultural issues and sensibilities.
We see the Escuela de Saberes Diversos as a space for self-education, acquiring skills and exchange. A place to shift something in ourselves.
Poliglotía is coordinated by Paco Inclán, a writer and teacher of Spanish to migrants and refugees.
Sessions: Tuesdays, 18.00 – 20.00
February: 7, 21
March: 7, 21
April: 4, 18
May: 2, 16, 30
June: 13, 27
