Everyone knows Asger Jorn. The best of painters. In addition to which, he did everything. Marvels: that is to say, in every domain, innovations. We are even beginning to learn—and here the latecomers will be forced to catch up quick—of his decisive contribution to the new urbanism and the creation of a situationist topology. Not to mention détourned painting, which is something quite different from ordinary painting; hundreds of pages of studies on aesthetics, from which aesthetics will never recover; the largest ceramic work in the world. And, of course, tapestry. Asger Jorn never stopped exiting painting, on every side.
Michèle Bernstein, 1960
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.
To Asger Jorn, producing, collecting, and reworking images was a way of transforming the world. In 1946 he 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 experience proved the value of artistic experiments. It also 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.”
Taking its cue from this experiment, Open Creation and Its Enemies presents an expansive and inviting view of Asger Jorn. 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Prestsæter, the exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive book featuring translations of canonical and hitherto unpublished texts by Jorn as well as new perspectives on his practice.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:
For more information, please check the Spanish version.
Diego Navarro and Darío Alva (from the Programa d’Art i Context), together with Laura Costas present Genesis: Conceptualisation of Imagined Lives, a two-part workshop on one of humanity’s oldest and most persistent imaginative exercises: speculation on fictitious ways of life and their life course. To do this, the first day will focus on the visualisation and analysis of fragments of cinematographic media, gameplay and literary media that deal with the representation of imagined beings and their relationship with natural environments and humanity. This leads to the second day in which some of the potential phases of development of an imagined being will be detailed, such as initial sketching processes, the use of tools and databases assisted by artificial intelligence for the iteration of initial ideas; sound manipulation processes to expand the personality of the imagined being and, finally, a look at examples from the world of video games where all these elements converge in simulations of imagined lives that awaken real emotions in us.
Laura Costas is a doll and artefact maker born in Vigo. Her work revolves around toys, childhood and violence with works such as Another foolish contender , To die in the countryside or Demon baby has its mother eyes. Her output goes beyond sculpture, working also with sound, performance and paper media.
El gesto narrativo. Reading group facilitated by Álvaro de los Ángeles
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.
1914-1939: Historic vanguards
«This period comprises from the First World War until the start of the Second, the same year in which the Spanish Civil War ended. IVAM possesses a significant collection of works belonging to historic European vanguards, especially from constructivism, dadaism, futurism, neoplasticism and non-figurative or concrete abstraction.»
—La tela de araña (1923) de Joseph Roth. Ed. Acantilado.
Wednesday 2nd November 2022 at 18.00.
This foreboding book perfectly exemplifies what was happening in the countries resulting from the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian empire. It was originally published in weekly instalments in the Viennese newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung, between October and November 1923, just a few days before the Munich Putsch, the failed coup d’état by Hitler and Ludendorff. The importance of newspapers and the expansion of illustrated magazines will give us chance to talk about the entire graphic production resulting in the collages of John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and the universe of George Grosz and, therefore, of the historic vanguards. Joseph Roth died in 1939 in Paris, the city he had emigrated to in 1933. Few authors had reported so bravely on the rise of the Third Reich and the reasons for the collapse of the Habsburg empire.
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.
1939-1961: Art in post-war Europe
«The twenty two years that make up this period, covering four decades, stand out for the consolidation of artistic movements such as European informalism or American abstract expressionism, together with new proposals of geometric abstract art, in a context framed by the long European post-war period and the hardest years of the Franco dictatorship.»
—Nada (1945) by Carmen Laforet. Eds. Austral, Cátedra…
Wednesday14th December 2022 at 18.00.
Barely five years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, and with the Second World War in its final stage, Carmen Laforet won the Premio Nadal literary prize with this simple, tough and profound novel. With the end of the conflict, the toughest repression of the first years of the 1940’s and the exile of hundreds of thousands of republicans, Spain is poorer, more ignorant and darker. This book is a door to a still inhospitable place which will gradually find new ways of expressing itself in literature, poetry, theatre and art. Informalism will be a window from which to be able to express, in silence, what still cannot be introduced to the Spanish stage, the victorious winds of an abstract expressionism that blow, continuously, from the United States.
Artists Alba Herrero (Valencia, 1986) and Ana Penyas (Valencia, 1987), along with Nuria Enguita, director of IVAM, Marcela Bahamón and Diana Isabel Cruz, who are domestic and care workers, present the exhibition by Ana Penyas y Alba Herrero. En una casa. Genealogía del trabajo del hogar y los cuidados.
The exhibition is a project conceived by the artists specifically for Gallery 3 at IVAM. It presents the hybrid nature between the graphic narrative and social research. It puts domestic work and paid care into focus, the work that takes place outside one’s own home and within the privacy of someone else’s home, whether within or outside the formal economy. This is feminized and insecure work, where the social construct of responsibility is reproduced as an inherently female issue. Despite the importance of care for a sustainable life, historically, these workers have been ignored and displaced in spheres such as the economy and politics, which means that, even today, we do not collectively ask ourselves how we provide care and how we would wish to do so.
Ana Penyas and Alba Herrero propose a journey through the private and the political. Through the use of archive material and the life experiences of women of different ages and backgrounds – mostly domestic and care workers, but also employers – the project looks at the temporal, spatial and social changes linked to this work. It proposes an open re-reading of the family and work models, the trajectory of collective mobilization towards a recognition of dignified rights and conditions at work, and the motivations and expectations of life for those who carry out the work and those who receive it. In short, the social organization of care.
On the occasion of the exhibition Far from the void. ZERO and the post-war art of Europe is showing the film Piero Manzoni and ZERO (2018), by Francesca Pola .She is one of the most prolific authors of the new narratives on the history of art from the second half of the 20th century, and she has placed special attention on the artists who promoted the renewal of arts in Europe since the 1950s, within the ZERO and Azimut/h setting.
After the film, which was written and directed by Pola, the author will chat with the curator of the exhibition, Bartomeu Marí, about the new historical perspectives and methodologies for reviewing stories of contemporary art, the importance of oral history and the new challenges and objectives for the history of art.
For more information, please check the Spanish version.
New Scenario (Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig) introduce a workshop in which they will produce fast, ad hoc, exhibition spaces with works of art (proxi-) in situ. The activity will centre around the opportunities and problems with certain spaces when it comes to exhibiting beyond the white cube. Hence, they will explore some of IVAM’s spaces and will deal with questions of documentation and dissemination.
Participants should bring along day-to-day objects or art to carry out the activity.
Since 2015, the artistic and curatorial project, New Scenario, by visual artists Paul Barsch and Tilman Hornig, has designed and created various online exhibitions with international artists in narrative settings –(off)site-specific, without white cubes, which go beyond the conventional exhibition space- to explore and redefine new formats of presentation in the post-digital era. Their most famous exhibition project, Body Holes, which took place in the holes of the body, formed part of the 9th Berlin Biennale. In 2021, they premiered the group exhibition, Chernobyl Papers, which was done in the contaminated exclusion zone surrounding the remains of the nuclear reactor.
Projects: Crash (2015), Jurassic Paint (2015), Body Holes (2016), Residency (2017), Hope (2017), Cameron Nichole is Chloe Sevigny is Bruce Nauman (2018), Whiteout (2019), Chernobyl Papers (2021).
Juan José Lahuerta, curator of the exhibition, and Nuria Enguita, director of IVAM, invite us to the presentation of “SER ARTISTA. Julio González”, a review of the Julio González background from the IVAM Collection which aims to cast new light on this great artist’s work, moving away from certain myths about his life and his works that have persisted since the middle of the last century.
This new presentation of the work of Julio González is based on a study of the collection without prejudice of the operational history: forgetting González to discover its complexity, as a piece of art and as a collection. Considering all of the “stages”, all of the “themes” and all of the “arts” as equal, in the contexts given to us by the extraordinary archive materials (documents, photographs, etc.), and the history of their era(s).
Juan José Lahuerta is a professor of the History of Art at the Barcelona School of Architecture and director of the Gaudí Chair. He has taught at universities including the IUAV in Venice or New York University, among others. He has been Head of Collections at the National Art Museum of Catalonia and Senior Curator at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. He has published books about art and architecture, including, for example, 1927. La abstracción necesaria (1989); Antoni Gaudí, 1852-1926. Architettura, ideologia e politica (1992); Le Corbusier. Espagne. Carnets (2001); Estudios antiguos (2009); Humaredas. Arquitectura, ornamentación y medios impresos (2010); Religious Painting. Picasso and Max Von Moos (2015); Marginalia. Aby Warburg, Carl Einstein (2015); Photography or Life: Popular Mies (2015); On Loos, Ornament, and Crime (2015); Antoni Gaudí. Ornament, Fire, and Ashes (2016); Arte en la época del infierno (2021); and the catalogue of the exhibition held at the MNAC in Barcelona and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, Gaudí (2022). He is a member of the Casabella Scientific Council and founder and director of Mudito&Co publishing company.
The Programa d’Art i Context (IVAM) invites Manuel Minch to develop the new image website. After this, you have the interview that we have prepared in which he discloses some of his secrets.
The exhibition Mar Arza. A pesar / A saber / A tientas (In spite / In short / In darkness) is a project specifically for Gallery 3 of the IVAM. Conceived as an installation, it brings together archaeological pieces displayed in a dialogue with works by Julio González and those of the artist.
Within this framework, a book has been published in which Anna Manubens and Andrea Soto Calderón propose further reading, actual dialogues and poetic journeys based on the artist’s proposal. This supporting structure works because it does not match in the case of Manubens and Diosas caídas: matriz, maternidad, materialidad at the Soto Calderón. We now invite you to the presentation of this publication, and to continue broadening dialogues and viewpoints.
“When Mar summoned me to her studio to talk about the exhibition, she placed images on the table while weaving scraps of stories together. The first was an image of Shield (Coraza), a bronze piece that looks like a cast of the bust of a pregnant woman. On the inside, at the level of the navel, there is a stinger welded on, so that when placed on a body, in the space between the bulging bronze belly and the abdomen of the person putting on the shield, the stinger would prevent the shape of the sculpture from molding to the shape of the body. This would prevent the wearer of the armour from actually being in a protruding state of gestation”.
Anna Manubens
“On other occasions, Mar Arza has swept the page clean. Here she enters the void, her procedures and critical mechanisms don’t take on the form of judgement; on the contrary, what she does is to prepare herself to receive a form, as though she were skirting a beach made of noises, to work with its matter, to imagine, which is a genuine way of creating: what we see with the imagination, becomes. She makes the materials vibrate and sing, “sing all their elements for the power of laughter or love”, we can say that Mar Arza makes the material laugh, and in its laughter we can hear the powerful echo of other voices, those that resound in the dry touch of a sculpture, because she is not afraid to look at or cry for what has been lost”.
Andrea Soto Calderón
Anna Manubens is the director of Hangar, a centre for artistic research and production in Barcelona. Previously she has been an independent curator and producer with a preference for hybrid roles at the intersection of writing, research, programming, production support, institutional analysis and exhibitions. Until 2017 she was Head of Public Programmes at the CAPC museum of contemporary art in Bordeaux. Previously, she combined her freelance activity with teaching at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra and was a regular collaborator at the artist-run Auguste Orts (Brussels) dedicated to the production of, and consideration of artists’ films.
Andrea Soto Calderón holds a PhD in Philosophy and teaches Aesthetics and Art Theory. Her lines of research focus on the transformations of aesthetic experience in contemporary culture, criticism, the study of the image and media. Her recent publications include the book Le travail des images with Jacques Rancière, Les presses du réel, 2019, La performatividad de las imágenes, Metales Pesados, 2020, Imaginación material, Metales Pesados, 2022.
