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IVAM ProduceIVAM Centre Julio González
The Great Library of Alexandria was, in its time, the largest in the world. It is estimated that it was founded at the start of the 3rd century BC. It emerged from the ambitious idea of founding a city that contained universal knowledge, accommodating all culture and belief. In this way, it aimed to gather together all of the works of human ingenuity, which had to be included in a sort of immortal anthology for posterity. Its tragic end, a result of the flames and numerous disasters, meant that only a few parchments are preserved that were kept in the shelters of ordinary people, who kept them for safekeeping, protecting them from the persecution of the authorities and conquerors.
By centralizing the culture in once place, what happened there remains, the knowledge acquired. Time verses the book. But the library isn’t even necessarily an enclosed warehouse of books, and fire is not inevitably a destructive phenomenon. The library can be an entire town, just like fire can be an excuse to build.
In Valencia, fire brings us together around the temporary construction of new things; of the extraordinary and the surprising. We build the fallas (effigies), a temporary museum that forces us and demands that we go outside, turning the impossible into the everyday. We decentralize knowledge, we spread it around each neighborhood, around each corner. And we publish publications around our sculptures which, once the flames have gone, tell us about our own history, which remains recorded in the books about the falla: our library on a town-wide scale.
Indeed, what was once the Great Library of Alexandria today equates to what are the large databases that make up the virtual world; the internet. There lies all of the condensed knowledge: the universal knowledge and its amalgamation of cultures and sensitivities…that was the dream of the city of Alexandria.
But let’s imagine the internet goes down, it burns. let’s imagine the internet as a falla (effigy) burning; turned to ash, like the ancient Library. Indeed, as in the case of normal people, we keep our manuscripts on the shelves of our homes, safeguarding them from the fire that made us build them. Each specimen, of each falla, in each home: on a shelf or in a drawer, new or broken, read or to be read… Like a large library that stretches throughout the region.
And, in our bedroom, which is our most private space, we read it and share it with those who are nearest. We open it to discover that mix of reflections and also memories together with our loved ones. Also a temporary reality, that someone will read about in the future and about which, in the end, only the llibrets will be left.
Desde el primer Adán que vio la noche
Y el día y la figura de su mano,
Fabularon los hombres y fijaron
En piedra o en metal o en pergamino
Cuanto ciñe la tierra o plasma el sueño.
Aqui está su labor: la Biblioteca.
Dicen que los volúmenes que abarca
Dejan atrás la cifra de los astros
O de la arena del desierto. El hombre
Que quisiera agotarla perdería
La razón y los ojos temerarios.
Aquí la gran memoria de los siglos
Que fueron, las espadas y los héroes.
[…]
Declaran los infieles que si ardiera,
Ardería la historia. Se equivocan.
Las vigilias humanas engendraron
Los infinitos libros. Si de todos
No quedara uno solo, volverían
A engendrar cada hoja y cada línea,
Cada trabajo y cada amor de Hércules,
Cada lección de cada manuscrito.
[…]
Extract from the poem “Alexandria, 641 AD” by Jorge Luis Borges.
Presentation manager Julia Garimorth, exhibition curator; Nicholas Fox Weber, Executive Director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and Nuria Enguita, Director of IVAM.
The exhibition presents the work of two great artists, Anni and Josef Albers, who were pioneers of 20th century modernism through their art production lines.
The display fully covers their careers in art, both individually and together, being the first time that the work of the artists as a couple throughout their different creative phases has been exhibited in Spain. The exhibition is organized chronologically and consists of almost 350 works, among them paintings, photographs, design and textiles, films, documentary material, as well as a selection of pieces of furniture from the Bauhaus phase that represent fundamental landmarks in the careers of this artist couple.
Exhibition opens: Thursday 24 February at 20:00hrs
For Teresa Lanceta (Barcelona, 1951), the act of weaving constitutes a triggering of critical imagination beyond the confines of materiality. For her, weaving is an open-source formula of repetition and rupture, from which it is possible to read, transform and convey a knowledge that is always complex and plural. It is a procedure for which there is no rough outline to follow; where figure and ground, object and language, medium and image, come together at the same time, assuming the unexpected, along with error and success. Accepting the unexpected is for Lanceta a way of learning a primordial and universal source or code that clearly manifests an internal law; a law that transcends physical, temporal and cultural frontiers. For weaving is a techné – a ‘technical’ knowledge dependent on a specific geographical, cultural and human context, be it, in her case, Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood, where she lived, or the Middle Atlas, which she visited every year for three decades. Both of these places fed her fascination for women’s work and the non-verbal communication of stories and emotional bonds.
Teresa Lanceta. Weaving as Open Source traces the artist’s trajectory from the 1970s through to the present day and includes a broad selection of tapestries, weavings, fabrics, drawings, photographs and videos, offering the most comprehensive overview of her work to date. The exhibition also explores Lanceta’s interest in collaborative work formats based around dialogues that she establishes with the help of ‘creative accomplices’, including Olga Diego, Pedro G. Romero and Xabier Salaberria; the curator Leire Vergara; the art collective La Trinxera; the filmmaker Virginia García del Pino; the artist and thinker Nicolas Malevé who, together with members of the Museum’s Education Department and pupils and teachers from Miquel Tarradell secondary school, has spent the last few years developing the project The Trades in the Raval.
Co-production of the MACBA-Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Arte and IVAM Valencia Institute of Modern Art
This fourth edition of El Berenar is proposed as a gathering in which the invited artists –Álvaro Porras (artista del Programa), Gema Quiles and Ana Císcar– organize a dialog based on their interests and some of the aspects that unite them.
El Berenar is an activity that is proposed as an informal encounter for presenting the projects of artists, authors and agents that have a Valencian context. In each edition, two invitees, along with one of the artists forming part of the Art and Context Program, will talk in turn about their projects and interests.
The event will take place on Thursday February 10, 2022 at 6 p.m.
Álvaro Porras displays his work thru the permutation of symbolic and somatic codes in line with experiential and emancipatory practices of art within an urban context. With the intention of creating a historiographical account, his work echoes thru painting and graphics, as a response to the process of writing, towards the concepts of minimal action and intervention.
Gema Quiles lives and works in Valencia. Focused on painting and sculpture, her work deals with the reinterpretation of reality and the creation of new spaces. These are individual and personal spaces relating to her development, which emerge from the escape from a hostile environment. As reference, she uses resources found in nature and in landscapes, creating a personal language through the use of repetition and synthesis.
Ana Císcar is a visual artist who works and lives in Valencia. Her art training focuses mostly on figurative painting in which she explores concepts related to the documentary image, the representation of violence and the politics of visibility. Thru montage work, the images she uses to recompose and juxtapose her work become blurred, using a distinctive deconstructive strategy which enables a rethinking of the images used by the artist.
Poliglotía. Arte Ebru con Meral Gokcek
In this workshop we will look at Ebru art, a traditional Turkish artform classed as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2014 by UNESCO. Ebru flourished and developed into what we know it as today right in the heart of the Ottoman Empire, as a catalyst for all the intercultural riches of the time.
Ebru art is made with drops of natural ink on water. Those who take part in the workshop will experiment with different traditional techniques in which water acts as a canvas on which the paint expands. This is how the unique and unrepeatable drawings and patterns are achieved, simply because it is the movement that we give to the water which ends up defining the shape of each design. It has also been practiced as a meditative artform.
The workshop will be led by Turkish artist Meral Gokcek, coordinator of Ebru-Valencia. This activity is included in the Poliglotía program.
The Inventario project. Poliglotia (The museum thinks together) proposes creating a place for meeting and brainstorming, reflecting on the possibilities, limits and problems related to the museum itself as an architectural, institutional, relational, creative, and exhibition area. As such, we propose the formation of a project team that can think together about the inventory of the tensions, challenges, and opportunities offered by the different agents and experiences that constitute part of museum life.
The group composition has maintained its identifying signs of Poliglotía, a program conceived from the cultural and linguistic diversity present in the city of Valencia.
The project team will meet for eight sessions between the months of March and June 2022. The reflections and discussions that come out of this will be shared with the public in two open door sessions which will take place in May, on the International Day of Museums, and in June, closing this edition of the Poliglotía program.
The Inventario project. Poliglotia (The museum thinks together) is made up of: Milagros Arias, Joaquín Artime, Tarif Ashtar, Óscar Blanco, Yulia Fert, Paula Guardiola, Badinengany Katalay-Sun, Elena Medina, Malika Oucheitachn, Sonia Pina, Esther Santiago Lizama, Clara Solbes and José Vaquerizo.
Dates: March 1 and 22, April 12 and 26, May 3 and 17, June 7 and 14, 2022.
Time: 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm.
Actions generated by the Inventory Group. Polyglotism
The fissures of NO. Influencing the possibilities and prohibitions of the museum
The mechanics of the day-to-day
Rastros en la ciudad (Trails in the city)
Poliglotía. Human Libraries with FUNTUN (Valencia Acoge)
The FUNTUN Group develops tools that visualize the various migratory realities using Human Libraries, meetings where we can “read” histories in the voices of the main characters. This pedagogical tool is based on participation, taking a close-up view of the migrants in our society, who share life stories the encourage reflection.
This initiative is developed from the awareness-raising department of the Valencia Acoge association, a caring space for intercultural learning and fighting against racism and uncaring individualism, that contributes to creating a better society through the participation and actions of native people and immigrants.
With participation from Joana Martins Do Santos (Brazil), Malika Ouchitachen (Morocco), Vivian Ntih (Nigeria), Oswaldo Vergel (Columbia), Fatima Guisse (Senegal), Katyuska Martínez (Venezuela), Jefry Pérez (Nicaragua), and Sushila Baral (Nepal).
From their research for the Programa d’Art i Context on speculative evolution and narrative fiction concepts, Diego Navarro and Dario Alva have created a collaboration with philosopher, dancer and choreographer Miguel Ballarín. This is a choreography and conversational proposal which provides the opportunity to expand on, study, and analyze certain aspects of Navarro and Alva’s research with the audience.
Coral, ‘un fómite’ has arisen from a synthesis of earlier collaborative processes between the three artists with artworks such as Cenotafio, on display at the Canal and Madrid Theatres in 2018, or Inventario, in development since 2019. In this case, the piece focuses on the development of a choreography language related to movement sonorities and languages known as “coral”: those which, according to Ballarín’s definition, are “exercises in caring for the body itself”, which are found “in technique as something similar to a home”, and which enable us to “accept ourselves while accepting this place”. The presentation has come from a concentrated sample in time of choreography elements, surrounded by sound and visual resources for the purpose of creating an atmosphere or a feeling of “place” in the audience, and in relation Navarro and Alva’s project aims to create immersion experiences in fictional environments. Once the piece has finished, there will be an opportunity for dialogue with the spectators and there will be an exchange of ideas and impressions on certain concepts that arise during the piece, with the help of texts and small visual artefacts (similar to picture cards) which will be distributed throughout the audience.
Miguel Ballarín (Madrid, 1993). Philosopher, dancer and researcher in contemporary body art. He works between the spheres of theoretical criticism, choreography practice, and poetic creation. Obtaining a doctorate with the project “Body and crisis: a criticism of the romantic time” under the supervision of José Manuel Cuesta Abad at the Department of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Member of the Complutense Seminary of Research on Dance History and Theory. Founder of the contemporary urban dance company Co-IApso, he has led artistic residency programs in national centers including Naves Matadero, Conde Duque as well as the Canal and international theatres such as B.Motion Festival 2018 (Venice) and Tanzkongress 2019 (Dresden). As a performer and poet, he works with Arca (Sonar Festival 2019) and incorporates the multidisciplinary group of experimental digital performing arts, Mitrilo, alongside artists such as Sergio Razorade, Valeria Baret and Sevi Iko Domochevsky. Dance and Urban Music Teacher at the María Dolores Pradera Municipal School, Madrid, he coordinated and redrafted the textbook Historia de la Danza III: Danzas Urbanas (Mahali publishing house). Among his most recent publications, it is worth mentioning A Cataphoric Withness, along with Victor Aguado, as part of Party Studies Vol.1 (Errant Bodies Press, Berlin) and Ocupares: desestar un mal como (“The names of fear” seminar, Matadero Madrid), a choreojuridic critique of the Desokupa business practices.
Jordi Teixidor (Valencia, 1941) has been one of the leading exponents of abstract painting in Academic Spain from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes (Royal Academy of Fine Arts) of San Fernando since 2000. In 2014, he received the National Award for Plastic Arts. IVAM has paid particular attention to this tireless, cult, rigorous and unclassifiable creator throughout his history: In addition to including his work in its collections and in important group exhibitions, in 1997, the museum dedicated a major retrospective exhibition and publication to him.
With Endgame, the museum takes another look at Teixidor’s work, shaping a project that distances itself from a retrospective of use. This exhibition stages new conversation spaces to establish stimulating dialogues which take into account the coherence of Teixidor’s plastic language, in addition to his personal attitude to the challenge of creation: “Devoting yourself to art means choosing a reality to settle into”.
The project by Guillermo Ros An exercise in violence links several narrative and conceptual lines: the issue of the artist’s institutional integration, the issue of violence, present in the project as an indicator of the possibility of movement and change, and the allusions to certain historic events that appear vaguely but persistently in the design of the exhibition. In her talk, Natalya Serkova will seek to identify and discover these connections, in order to speculate how a project can bring together such seemingly different issues like the French Revolution, the phenomenology of artistic production, the behavior of rats and love.
Introduction by Julia Castelló (Barcelona, 1992), art historian and independent curator. Together with Ali A. Maderuelo, she has been the co-founder of the self-managed space A10 (Valencia) since 2019. She was the associate curator and publications officer at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art (Valencia, 2017-2021). She has co-curated, also with Maderuelo, the exhibitions «Can’t Speak for Itself» at La Casa Encendida (Madrid, 2018), “Hoy puede ser tu día” (Espai Tactel Toormix, Barcelona, 2021), “Fauna de las Cuatro Torres” by Amalia Ulman (Centre del Carme de Cultura Contemporània, Valencia, 2021) and “Una cruzada de pasiones” (House of Chappaz, Valencia, 2021). Currently, they form part of the curatorial team of IVAM’s Art and Context Program.
Natalya Serkova (1988, Rusia). Philosopher and art theorist, currently living in Moscow. She graduated in Philosophy at the RSUH in Moscow. She is the co-founder of TZVETNIK, a platform that explores and promotes contemporary art from all over the world. Her book, What can be given (“То, что может быть дано”), written in the genre of “fiction theory”, was published for the first time in 2017 in Russian. She is a contributor of Moscow Art Magazine, e-flux magazine, RevistaArta, isthisit?, OFluxo and other media focused on contemporary art. Currently, her research focuses on the fields of the aesthetics of objects, the latest perspectives of the phenomenology and philosophy of art.
PRESENTATION OF THE PUBLICATION An exercise in violence, with texts by Natalya Serkova and Julia Castelló.
* Natalya Serkova will connect with IVAM online, where those present in the auditorium may raise other issues in addition to those raised by the artist, Guillermo Ros, and the moderator, Julia Castelló. It will be simultaneously interpreted in English – Spanish.
As part of the exhibition “Essays on Seediness. Readings of the Archive Miguel Benlloch”, we present a concert by Álvaro Romero (RomeroMartín) in collaboration with the Teatre Musical (TEM). Get your tickets!
Over the years, Álvaro Romero has developed an artistic practice inspired by flamenco, the critical extreme of the poetic, research, electronics, agitation and popular criticism of the LGTBI collective. His work aims to promote discourse and collaborative practices that reinforce visions and conceptions of the world which are not sanctioned by the dominant ideology and, in the best of cases, propose other alternative, liberating visions. In order to do so, he uses references from homosexual writers and poets such as Pedro Lemebel, Miguel Benlloch or Jean Genet, amongst others, in whose writings he finds a representation of himself, whilst also viewing them as particularly necessary for this turbulent time in which we find ourselves.
On a musical level, in the RomeroMartín project, he works with the producer Toni Martín, using electronic music software to accompany folk singing in its most classic and archaic forms, taking up the challenge of liberating oneself from the restrictions of prerecording and depending on momentary inspiration at the time of singing.
Currently, Álvaro Romero is involved in a creative process with the Portuguese producer Pedro Da Linha (Buraka Som Sistema). Together, they are researching the folklore of Portugal and Spain to consider how the colonization carried out by both countries has influenced past and recent music, looking at the influxes and ebbs that have occurred and are occurring at a musical level, along with the cultural relationship that has formed as a result of those comings and goings, of exploitation, slavery, migration, etc., not to mention the way in which this influences the music and art in general of both countries, giving shape to new sounds, such as the progressive Kuduro created in the suburbs of Lisbon.
This third edition of El Berenar will take the form of an encounter as part of which the guest artists –Claudia Dyboski (Program artist), Alejandro Ocaña and Bella Báguena– will present a dialogue based on their work and interests. A conversation in which attendees will be invited to participate and be part of the activity.
El Berenar constitutes an informal meeting place whereby artists, authors or other cultural practitioners working in Valencia can present their ideas and projects. In each edition, two guests together with one of the artists from the Art and Context Program will discuss their projects or interests.
The activity will be on Wednesday, 26th January 2022, at 6:00 p.m.
Claudia Dyboski is a Valencian sculptor. Populated by hybrid beasts and rudimentary artifacts, her imaginary proposes a world slowly recovering from a dystopian era – a resurgence of intelligent life in a new biological age. These nascent beings have human features; some of them contain parts of the machines left behind by man in their bodies. They speak another language, and hide in forests and the ruins of ancient civilizations. Dyboski sculpts a world of rubbish and silicone, foam and wire, where life regenerates and transforms: it is a world without words, a life still in its conceptual stages, tentatively trying out its new body on an aged planet.
Alejandro Ocaña is an artist based in Valencia. His work is based on collective events and parties, giving rise to an artistic production whose main objectives are the participation of others and the use of humor, and involving a succession of group actions that aim to be considered as “nonsense” and /or “irrelevant”.
Bella Báguena is a Valencian transfeminine artist who works with different disciplines such as music, performance, jewelry and other media. Her artistic production is generated via an intuitive and emotional process, using voice and body movement, as well as objects, spaces and technologies to create sound, video, sculptural or performative pieces, in which emotional expression and thought are key.