Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Julio González Prize 2020

The exhibition devoted to Mona Hatoum, a British artist of Palestinian origin gathers together a selection of sculptures, large-scale installations and works on paper created mostly in the last two decades. It is intended to serve as a tribute to an artistic oeuvre of great diversity and significance and to give the public in Valencia a first-hand, physical experience of the diversity and scope of her output presenting key works that have become iconic pieces of the contemporary art world.

Hatoum is interested in creating formally simple and reductive works that nevertheless impact viewers on an emotional and psychological level. Her work is intentionally created with paradoxical layers of meaning that produce ambiguity and ambivalence to allow several possible and contradictory readings. She often uses attractive and seductive materials to create alluring objects and installations that, on close inspection, reveal a hidden layer of threat or danger lurking underneath the surface.

Mona Hatoum was born into a Palestinian family in Beirut in 1952. While on a short visit to London in 1975 the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War prevented her from returning home and she has lived in London ever since. She has held solo exhibitions in numerous museums in Europe, the United States, Canada and Australia. She has also participated in many important international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005), Documenta, Kassel (2002 and 2017), Biennale of Sydney (2006) and Istanbul Biennial (1995 and 2011). Recent solo exhibitions include a major survey organised by Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015), Tate Modern, London and KIASMA, Helsinki (2016-2017).

The work of Guillermo Ros (Vinalesa, 1988) centres on the investigation of the relationship between contemporary systemic violence, artistic production and a personal “lore” manifested in a testimonial role. His study specifically addresses power relations, the legitimisation, justification and promotion of self-exploitation, and the role of the artist as an inexhaustible machine of schizophrenic production, more concerned with the final objective based on the catharsis of exhibition than with caring for his or her own human condition. Such a task materialises in the intervention of the exhibition space as though it were a newly frozen stage, where the dialogue between materials, forms and architecture speaks of the silence shrouding the production of any artwork during its final reception.

For Gallery 6 at the IVAM, Guillermo Ros will continue and reformulate this line of work to present a previously unseen project devised specifically for this space, departing from a particular moment that will determine and define its creation.

Guillermo Ros currently lives and works in Alboraya. He graduated in Fine Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, where he then took his Master’s degree in Artistic Production. His work, mainly in the overlapping fields of sculpture and installation, has been exhibited in Spain in cities like Valencia, Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca and Madrid, and internationally in Bogota, Lisbon and Vienna, with shows also coming up in Oporto and London. Among other awards, he won last year’s Senyera Prize for Visual Arts, and his work forms part of private and institutional collections both in Spain and abroad.

Industry. Matrices, threads and sounds is a hybrid proposal that is situated between the creation of an archive and an artistic project. Its objective is to offer a necessarily partial reading of Valencian industrial heritage based on the sound, the intangible and social movements. The proposal is developed through the compilation of sounds, processes, images, videos, music, art pieces and discourses linked to factories in their original context of use, but also in their abandonment and their conversion into heritage spaces. Industry focuses particularly on the proactive uses of industrial heritage driven by citizens.

In addition to the archive and the meetings (called matrices) to debate and reflection, an exhibition will be open with the materials and results of the research in May at IVAM. This exhibition is conceived as a museographic adaptation of the archive, inspired by Rodchenko’s «Worker’s Club».

Industry. Matrices, threads and sound is a process of memory that remains open to negotiation and new readings. The project is positioned outside the romanticizing image of industrial ruin. Understanding heritage and history as living processes that allow us to generate conceptual tools to understand the past, present and future of the history of labor and its relationship with culture. The proposal is developed by Lorenzo Sandoval, artist and curator, and Tono Vizcaíno, archaeologist and heritage manager.

The elements that make up this archive come from numerous personal and institutional archives: Salomé Moltó (CNT), Floreal Rodríguez de la Paz (CNT), Josep Fuster, Edurne Vaello, Nando Hervido, Damià Llorens / We Are not Brothers, Arxiu Municipal d’Alcoi, Universitat Politècnica de València – Campus d’Alcoi, Club d’Amigues i Amics de la Unesco d’Alcoi, Radio Alcoy, Vicent Cortés, Ateneu Cultural El Panical, Josep Tormo Colomina, Alcoy Industrial, Fani Grande, CCOO Camp de Morvedre – Alt Palància, Fundació de la Comunitat Valenciana de Patrimoni Industrial i Memòria Obrera de Port de Sagunt, Vic Pereiró, Miguel Ángel Martín, AMIMO – Associació Memòria Industrial i Moviment Obrer, Maria Hebenstreit, César Novella, Sagunt Territori Acústic, Arxiu Municipal de Sagunt, Arxiu Històric de CCOOPV «José Luis Borbolla», El Punt – Espai de Lliure Aprenentatge, Miguel Molina, Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia, Departament d’Escultura de la Facultat de Belles Arts de la Universitat Politècnica de València, Alfonso Civantos / Komakino / Subsist Records, José Miguel Requena Roselló / Excesivo.net, Txuki, Colectivo APA, Colectivo La Flem, Colectivo Resiste, Fran Lenaers, Für alle Fälle, José Azkárraga, Víctor Algarra y Paloma Berrocal, Diana Sánchez Mustieles, APIVA – Associació de Patrimoni Industrial Valencià, Cor de cambra Ad Libitum de l’Escola Coral Veus Juntes, Ajuntament de Quart de Poblet, Institut Valencià de Cultura de la Generalitat Valenciana, Josep Vicent Frechina, Biblioteca Històrica de la Universitat de València, Biblioteca Valenciana «Nicolau Primitiu», Arxiu de la Democràcia y Fonoteca de la Universitat d’Alacant, Arxiu Històric Provincial d’Alacant, CanPop – Cançoner Popular Valencià, Teresa Lanceta, Coral Tabaquera Alicantina, Francisco Moreno, Vicent Oncina, Manuel Carreres, Biblioteca de la Universitat Jaume I de Castelló, Arxiu Municipal d’Onda, Museu del Taulell d’Onda “Manolo Safont”, Caixa Popular d’Onda, Fundació Caixa Benicarló, Manel Francesc Navarro i del Alar, Alejandro Torres Tomás, Pilar Beltrán, Museu de Ceràmica de l’Alcora, Juan Carlos Olària, Fundación Centro Etnográfico «Joaquín Díaz» de la Diputación de Valladolid, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, e IVAM.

Lola Lasurt’s exhibition Cardiograma suggests various reflections on the recent past through a sculpture of a woman called “democracy” and two series of images projected on zinc plates or painted by the artist and arranged on each floor of the gallery.

Like an amateur historian, the artist recomposes various elements to construct a narrative with multiple meanings. The story has two beginnings. The first is a visit to the Museo del Gremi Artesà de Fallers, a museum in Valencia’s Ciutat Fallera district, and an encounter with a figure made for a Falla, possibly a ninot spared from the flames, called “democracy”. Made by José Azpeitia, perhaps in the early eighties, it is a life-size nude figure of a young woman lying face up with her eyes closed. The patina of dark paint that covers the fibreglass piece imitates the bronze finish of funerary sculptures. She appears to be dead, but her placid face invites us to think that perhaps she is only asleep. For the exhibition, the artist has collaborated with the school of the Grau Superior de Formació Professional d’Artista Faller i Construcció d’Escenografies, the guild of Falla artists, also based in Ciutat Fallera. The students have made a crochet cushion to support, hold, protect and care for the figure of “democracy”.

Projected onto zinc plates on the surrounding frieze are various images from family archives, made available by the Film Archive of the Institut Valencià de Cultura. Recorded between the 1950s and the 1970s, the images show different pyrotechnic displays like disparás, mascletás, cordás and santotomás. They represent a time before digitalisation, with analog images that in their turn show a primitive fire made with old pyrotechnic techniques. The artist has edited these images as an atonal score, producing a rhythm of bonfires and fireworks that the zinc plates will reactivate.
Another start to this story is developed on the upper floor. By means of a coloured frieze painted in oils, the artist mimetically produces a frame-by-frame representation of a video circulating on the internet that documents a pyrotechnic exhibition she was fortunate enough to witness. The display revived old-fashioned types of firework, like the Castell de Pals and the Roman candle, in Valencia’s Plaza de la Virgen during the July Fair of 2017. The frieze also relates to theories of atonal music, applied in this case to the timbre of colour.

The title of the exhibition, Cardiograma, refers to the notion of diagnosing the state of the system as personified in the timeless sculpture of “democracy”, preserved by the guild of Falla artists alongside the ninots it has saved from destruction. At the same time, we can also understand the fiesta of the Fallas itself as an exercise in collective diagnosis, doubly held in suspense this year by the pandemic, that responds annually to the socio-political issues of the moment.

In this exhibition, Lola Lasurt continues her investigations “out of time”, a mode of deferred thought that dodges around historical doctrine and uses painting to reorganise other tales of our past where images, objects and (in this case) popular festivals speak to us of a complex passage. With the artist, we wonder which point of democracy we have reached. What were its initial objectives? What were its aspirations? The figure of “democracy”, surrounded by “shooting” fireworks, tells us of a world in retreat that is revived by the artist, its image bouncing back into our present day.