Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Process and participation are central elements in Carolina Caycedo’s art, which offers a collective dimension through installations, drawings, performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of an environmental memory as an essential space for the climate and social justice. She challenges us to see nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders. Through her studio and field work with communities affected by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, Caycedo invites viewers to understand the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we can embrace resistance and solidarity. Movement, migration, connection, languages and exchanges are key concepts in her work, which she approaches with a strong ethical and feminist commitment. Through indigenous cosmologies and decolonial discourses, she proposes counternarratives to extractivism and violence in the world.

For Caycedo’s first exhibit in Europe, Artium (Vitoria) and IVAM (Valencia) present a general approach to her art over the last twenty years. This exhibit brings together works from important series, such as Be Dammed (2012–ongoing), a multimedia project that examines the impact that hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects have on communities and the environment. The exhibit will also present an iteration of the Street Museum, one of Caycedo’s first projects. It was first developed in Bogotá, Colombia, as part of the artist collective Colectivo Cambalache in 1998. It has since been revised and adapted with various configurations for projects in different locations. The project focuses on barter and redistribution understood as a form of social connection and research process. It is a key example of the circular economy that supports waste reduction, while promoting social cohesion.

Caycedo was born in London to Colombian parents. She lives in Los Angeles. Her recent individual exhibits include: Land of Friends, Baltic, Newcastle (2022); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (with David de Rozas) (2021); MCA Chicago (2020); ICA Boston (2020); Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2019). She has participated in multiple group exhibits including the 15th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2021), We Are History, Somerset House, London (2021); LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo de Barrio, New York (2021); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019).

Exhibition in collaboration with:

This proposal aims to jointly explore the work of female artists in Spain and Portugal in the final years of the dictatorship and the beginnings of democracy. The historical evolution of both countries in those years has many points in common. Both Spain and Portugal suffered long dictatorships, in fact both regimes adopted the same motto to summarize their ideology: “God, country and family.”

In the sixties and early seventies, the presence of female artists increased significantly in both countries, particularly in alternative circles and in opposition to the regime. When we examine the production of Spanish and Portuguese artists of the time, we see that they adopted a wide range of media and styles: abstraction and normative art, traditional realism, pop art and critical realism, conceptualism and neo-Dadaism, among others. Not all of them were concerned with reflecting on the female condition, but a significant number of the works produced by women in those years had to do, in one way or another, with themes close to the feminist agenda; such as the sexual division of labour, the social construct of societal roles, motherhood, domesticity or sexual violence. However, this feminist or proto-feminist aspect was ignored by most of the critics of the time (and even denied, on many occasions, by the artists themselves). It was not until a few years ago that some Spanish and Portuguese historians began to study the political dimension of many of these works.

This exhibit aims to reevaluate the work of Spanish and Portuguese artists at the time, taking into account their specificities with respect to the Anglo-Saxon model and highlighting the multiple parallels that we can find between them. It will also be an opportunity to investigate possible moments of exchange and encounter between artists from both countries.

List of artists participating in the project: Alice Jorge (1924-2008), Ana Buenaventura (1942), Ana Hatherly (1929-2015), Ana Peters (1932-2012), Ana Vieira (1940-2016), Ángela García Codoñer (1944), Àngels Ribé (1943), Aurèlia Muñoz (1926-2011, Aurora Valero (1940), Bertina Lopes (1924-2012), Ção Pestana (1953), Carme Aguadé (1920-2013), Clara Menéres (1943-2018), Concha Jerez (1941), Elena Asins (1940-2015), Elisabete Mileu (1956), Elisenda Sala (1938), Elvira Alfageme (1937), Emília Nadal (1938), Esther Ferrer (1937), Eugènia Balcells (1943), Eulàlia Grau (1946), Eva Lootz (1940), Fátima Vaz (1946-1992), Fina Miralles (1950), Graça Morais (1948), Graça Pereira Coutinho (1949), Gracinda Candeias (1947), Helena Almeida (1934-2018), Helena Lapas (1940), Helena Lumbreras (1935-1995), Irene Buarque (1943), Isabel Baquedano (1936-2018), Isabel Oliver (1946), Jane Millares Sall (1928), Joana Rosa (1959), Juana Francés (1924-1990) , Lola Bosshard (1922-2012), Lourdes Castro (1930-2022), Luísa Correia Pereira (1945-2009), Magda Bolumar (1936), Manuela Almeida (1944-2002), Maria Antónia Siza (1940-1973), Maria Beatriz (1940-2020), María Droc (1903-1987), Maria José Aguiar (1948), Maria José Oliveira (1943), María Teresa Codina (1926-2016), Marisa González (1943), Menez (1926-1995), Paula Rego (1935-2022), Renée Gagnon (1942), Salette Tavares (1922-1994), Silvia Gubern (1941), Soledad Sevilla (1944), Teresa Gancedo (1937), Teresa Magalhães (1944-2023) and Túlia Saldanha (1930-1988). 

Exhibition coproduced with:

This project has been possible with the collaboration of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E)

Collaboration:

As part of the commemoration of 100 years after the birth of the Alicante artist Eusebio Sempere and in collaboration with the MACA, Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante, the IVAM offers an exhibit about Eusebio Sempere limited to his time in Paris, a period of time that extends from early 1949 to January 1960.

Despite his small successes, Sempere lived through difficult times, but he produced two very important series in his career: on the one hand, the series of gouaches on cardboard, the so-called Paris Gouaches; on the other, the luminous reliefs, a type of artifact with electrical installation which simulates movement through the different alternately illuminated planes where the geometric shapes are cut out. Although he first began using gouaches, with simpler and cheaper materials and workmanship, the luminous reliefs coexisted with them until the early sixties. And both respond to the same aesthetic concern. The luminous reliefs are one of Sempere’s most important contributions to optical and kinetic movement. A very important number of works from these two series are preserved in the collections of the IVAM and the MACA.

In Paris, Sempere builds a universe of personal and artistic relationships that are the basis of his personality and which forever establish his talent. His friends at the Colegio de España school Eduardo Chillida, Pablo Palazuelo, Salvador Victoria, Lucio Muñoz and the Valencians Doro Balaguer and Vicente Castellano. His relationship with the Denise René Gallery and the geometric artists Vasarely, Arp, Schoffer, Soto, Sobrino, Mortensen, etc. His contact with avant-garde artists such as Kandinsky (through his widow Nina Kandinsky), Braque (whom he visited in his studio) or Julio González, whom he met through the latter’s friendship with his daughter Roberta. Also belonging to this period is the learning of the silkscreen technique in the workshop of Wifredo Arcay, a Cuban artist whom he met through Loló Soldevilla, a Cuban painter and cultural attaché at the Cuban Embassy in Paris, who introduced him to the artistic circles of the French capital.

All of this is reflected in the large amount of documentation that is preserved in this regard and which can be seen in the exhibit: scrapbooks, texts by the artist, press, photographs, extraordinary epistolary collections, correspondence with family members, artists, critics, etc.

Sound is one of the media that comes closest to ecology. The relationship between art, music and the environment has been one of the channels with the most presence in Llorenç Barber’s work. From the perception of the soundscape as a form of musical production to self-management processes, his pioneering work in sound art proposes a series of radical positions that are constantly updated. The notion of plurifocality with which the city concerts have been developing offers keys to a work of the multiple and the diverse: in these concerts, the sounds come from bell towers, from bands, or from the different possibilities that each of the cities can offer. Likewise, the listening points are multiple and varied; all of them valid.

The archive we present places special emphasis on the practice of listening. It includes the practice not only of Llorenç Barber, but also that of his many collaborators over several decades. The archive materials pass through festivals and programs such as the classic Ensems de Valencia, the Aula de Música of the University of Madrid, Paralelo Madrid or Nit’s de Aielo, as well as through their collaborations with groups such as Actum, Taller de Música Mundana, Flatus Vocis Trio, Colectivo Elenfante or his long collaboration with Montserrat Palacios. In addition to the documents in paper, the archive presents for the first time the digitization of its numerous sound collection through collaboration with the Intermedia Creations Laboratory research group of the Department of Sculpture of the Polytechnic University of Valencia.

The proposal presents the idea of ​​plurifocality applied to the archive, through a new composition made from archive materials. This proposal is made by Llorenç Barber, Pedro André and Monserrat Palacios, in conversation with Lorenzo Sandoval, presenting a sonic travelogue from the digitized contents. Tono Vízcaíno also collaborates as a documentalist.