Educational research project with MACBA, Center d’Art la Panera and Es Baluard Museu

IVAM Centre Julio González

“Thinking Together about a Mobile Art Unit” is a networked research project that sets out from the idea of a “museum outside the museum” and mobile art units as catalysts able to spark participation in culture in terms of creation, establishing new discourses and stimulating the poetic and political imagination. In particular, the research explores the possibility of setting up projects situated and co-created between the community, artists and artistic mediators who experiment with prototype mobile art units that are not objectual but conceptual, replicable and expandable into other contexts.

Taking part in the process are the education areas of MACBA (Barcelona), IVAM (València), Centre d’Art la Panera (Lleida) and Es Baluard Museu (Palma), with the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation. These teams have chosen “the right to the city” as a transversal line of work for each of them to approach it on the basis of their own circumstances and specific nature and, among the communities close to each of the institutions taking part, help to nurture spaces for collective emancipation strategies.

The four institutions have been working together wince 2020 and the research has crystallised in two forms.

Firstly, “Lo estamos haciendo” [“We’re Doing It”], a publication containing the collective thought process supported by artist Itxaso Corral about the idea of designing a mobile art unit. It is a notebook that aims to share some useful questions distilled from the intense experience this process of collective thought has involved, with the aim of encouraging others to set up new “thinking together” processes. Questions that go beyond the search for a mobile art unit design to become collective desires, learnings and metaphors concerning the interstices of what it means to be education departments in our institutions.

Since summer 2024, we have also been working on -ANDO RECORDS, a practical and experimental process to start up a horizontal collective process concerning rights and freedoms in urban contexts, including artists Lluc Mayol and Violeta Ospina and communities close to the different institutions.

This process takes the form of a sonic (rather than sound) publishing label in movement. A collective platform that sets out to work in the intersection between sound, speech and musicality in multiple formats. It is an open code, adaptable and freely shareable brand that aims to provide a flexible space for ideas to grow in line with each context and community, to encourage exchange between diverse realities that are experienced in different cities from a perspective of rights.

  • On February 25, 2025 at 5:00 p.m., the public presentation of the project will take place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
  • IVAM will activate -ANDO RECORDS in Valencia between April and May 2025.

 

       

 

                  

 

Con el apoyo de

ExhibitionLibraryIVAM Centre Julio González

Throughout her career, the painter Soledad Sevilla (Valencia, 1944) has developed a rigorous language based on the purity of line and colour, and on the construction of forms derived from geometric modules. This exhibition, curated by Isabel Tejeda, provides a chronological overview of the artist’s career through more than a hundred works, ranging from her early experiments at the Computing Centre of the University of Madrid to her most recent creations, some of which were made specifically for the exhibition. The retrospective underscores the artist’s assertion that she has painted the same picture throughout her life, linking her early works from the 1960s with her most recent series, such as Horizontes Blancos (White Horizons) and Esperando a Sempere (Waiting for Sempere), in which she pays tribute to her mentor and friend, Eusebio Sempere.

Although initially associated with the heterogeneous group of Spanish artists who adhered to the aesthetic principles of geometric abstraction – a group with whom she has remained close throughout her life – Sevilla soon distanced herself from using the computer as an artistic tool. Between 1980 and 1982, she spent time in Boston, a period crucial to the development of her career. There, she created, among other projects, the series Keiko, Stella and Belmont, which feature delicate, fine line drawings that anticipated the sense of vibration that would characterise her later paintings. Upon her return, line, patterns and light as vehicles of emotion led the artist to work on two essential pillars of Spanish culture: Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez and the Andalusian architecture of the Alhambra in Granada – the city where she now resides.

By the mid-1990s, an accumulation of brushstrokes began to rhythmically fill her canvases – as seen in En ruinas II (In Ruins II) and Díptico de Valencia (Valencia Diptych) – and nature began to dominate her works. A “vegetal magma”, in Sevilla’s own words, compacts the surface of the canvas, gradually revealing a line of light. Hanging vegetation, sleepless nights – represented in her serie Insomnio (Insomnia series)– and agricultural architecture lead the viewer to see the world through a woven pattern: patterns of leaves or plastic meshes inspired by the tobacco drying sheds of the Vega of Granada.

The generation of installations, through which Soledad Sevilla expands her aesthetic concerns into the spatial realm, has been another key aspect of her work since the 1980s. This exhibition documents some of her historical interventions, such as Vélez Blanco, created at the Vélez-Blanco Castle in Almería as part of the Plus Ultra Project for Expo ’92; or El tiempo vuela (Time Flies), a vanitas [a symbolic artwork reflecting on the transience of life and time] first displayed at the Galería Soledad Lorenzo in 1998. At the same time, the artist presents Donde estaba la línea (Where the Line Was), a new site-specific installation in which she uses cotton thread to intervene in the Museum’s space.

Exhibition organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in collaboration with the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, IVAM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prologue to the exhibition 'Atreverse a más'

Case studyIVAM Centre Julio González

This year 2025 marks the centenary of the birth of the artist Manolo Gil (Valencia 1925-1957), one of the most admired and important creators of the generation of artists of the post-war avant-garde in Spain, who died prematurely at the age of 32.

A cultured and well-traveled man, his plastic work was profoundly innovative and in continuous mutation. A founding member of the first post-war avant-garde group in Valencia, Grupo Z (1947-1950), he was also the ideologist and promoter – together with art critic Vicente Aguilera Cerni – of Grupo Parpalló (1956-1961).

Between 1992 and 1995 the IVAM added to its collection more than three hundred works by Manolo Gil, donated by his widow, the artist Jacinta Gil. Along with this collection of works, the museum’s Library and Documentation Center was also gifted with the donation of an album of more than two hundred pages made by Jacinta Gil that meticulously documents his entire career and the critical fortune of the artist after his death. Together with small catalogs, writings and documents from the period between 1945 and 1971, Jacinta Gil patiently assembled a selection of unpublished drawings that are shown for the first time in this exhibition.

This exhibition is conceived as a small tribute to the figure of Manolo Gil and is structured as a timeline based on materials extracted from the album and shown in dialogue with a representative selection of works from all the different stages of his career. At the same time, it acts as a prologue to the exhibition Atreverse a más, which will be on view at IVAM at the end of 2025, a project that will revisit Valencian art between 1947 and 1960 that is being curated by Ramon Escrivà and Nacho París.

EducationalIVAM Centre Julio González

IVAM’s new Soft Room is the museum’s response to a need to adapt its architecture for visitors of all ages. The room is designed especially for families with babies aged 0–1, where rest is welcome, pauses are an option, and the wellbeing of families is a priority for the museum. With soft cushioned walls and flooring for lying on or relaxing, with a texture pleasant to touch, and natural light, the IVAM offers a new way of visiting the museum: an oasis of calm in the frenetic pace of adult life and the city itself, offering another way of being in and inhabiting the museum’s spaces. Located in IVAMlab2, the room is available every day during the museum’s opening hours. The Soft Room includes an adjacent restroom equipped with an accessible toilet and changing table. Access can be requested at the ticket desk, where staff will provide all necessary information for using the space.

A space dynamized by Paco Inclán

AccessibilityPoliglotíaIVAM Centre Julio González

ENG

Throughout five editions, POLIGLOTÍA has opened its doors to people from diverse backgrounds and mother tongues to explore the possibilities of the museum as a space for dialogue and exchange of knowledge and experiences from a cultural and linguistic diversity approach.

For the next cycle of POLIGLOTIA, the sessions will again be open to people who are in the process of learning Spanish (from level B, intermediate). IVAM’s exhibitions and installations will serve as didactic and pedagogical resources. The participants’ mother tongues will also play a leading role in these multilingual encounters.

During eight sessions, the dynamics related to language learning will serve to generate a dialogue on issues related to the artistic and educational fields. The last session will be an open-door session to share the group’s work with the public at IVAM.

 

Dates 2024 / Hours: from 5 to 7 p.m.

October 23
October 30 – * Rescheduled date due to DANA in Valencia
November 6 – *
November 13 – *
November 20, 25 and 27
December 4, 11, 16 (Monday) and 18


Limited places

Those interested should send a brief letter of motivation to reserves_ext@ivam.es, with the subject POLIGLOTIA. Deadline for Registration: until Monday, October 14. Once the selection of participants has been made, all registered participants will be notified of the decision. The acceptance of participation in the group implies a commitment to attend all the sessions.

The letter of motivation must contain the following information:

· Name and surname(s)

· What level of Spanish do you have?

· What languages do you speak?

· What are your hobbies, interests?

· Can you attend the sessions at IVAM on Wednesdays from 5 to 7 p.m.?

 

CAST

A lo largo de cinco ediciones, POLIGLOTÍA ha abierto sus puertas a personas de diversas procedencias y lenguas maternas para explorar las posibilidades del museo como espacio de diálogo e intercambio de saberes y experiencias desde un enfoque de diversidad cultural y lingüística.

Para el siguiente ciclo de POLIGLOTÍA, las sesiones volverán a abrirse a personas que estén en un proceso de aprendizaje del español (a partir de niveles B, intermedios). Las exposiciones e instalaciones del IVAM servirán como recursos didácticos y pedagógicos. Las lenguas maternas de los y las participantes también tendrán su protagonismo en estos encuentros plurilingües.

Durante ocho sesiones, las dinámicas relacionadas con el aprendizaje del idioma servirán para generar un diálogo sobre cuestiones relacionadas con el ámbito artístico y educativo. La última sesión será de puertas abiertas para compartir con el público del IVAM el trabajo realizado por el grupo.

 

Fechas 2024 / Horario: de 17 a 19h

23 de octubre
30 de octubre – * Fecha reagendada a causa de la DANA de Valencia
6 de noviembre – *
13 de noviembre – *
20, 25 y 27 de noviembre
4, 11, 16 (lunes) y 18 de diciembre

 

Plazas limitadas

Las personas interesadas deberán enviar una breve carta de motivación a reserves_ext@ivam.es, con el asunto POLIGLOTIA. Plazo de inscripción: hasta el lunes 14 de octubre. Una vez se realice la selección de los/las participantes, se notificará la decisión a todas las personas inscritas. La aceptación de participación en el grupo implica el compromiso de asistencia a todas las sesiones.

La carta de motivación deberá contener la siguiente información:

· Nombre y apellidos

· ¿Qué nivel de español tienes?

· ¿Qué idiomas hablas?

· ¿Cuáles son tus aficiones, hobbies, intereses?

· ¿Puedes asistir los miércoles de 17 a 19 h a las sesiones en el IVAM?

 

FR

Au cours de ses cinq éditions, POLIGLOTÍA a ouvert ses portes à des personnes d’origines et de langues maternelles différentes afin d’explorer les possibilités du musée en tant qu’espace de dialogue et d’échange de connaissances et d’expériences, en mettant l’accent sur la diversité culturelle et linguistique.

Pour le prochain cycle de POLIGLOTIA, les sessions seront à nouveau ouvertes aux personnes qui sont en train d’apprendre l’espagnol (à partir du niveau B). Les expositions et les installations de l’IVAM serviront de ressources didactiques et pédagogiques. Les langues maternelles des participants joueront également un rôle prépondérant dans ces rencontres multilingues.

Au cours de huit sessions, la dynamique liée à l’apprentissage des langues servira à générer un dialogue sur des questions liées aux sphères artistiques et éducatives. La dernière séance sera une séance portes ouvertes pour partager le travail réalisé par le groupe avec le public de l’IVAM.


Dates 2024 / Horaires : de 17h à 19h

23 octobre
30 octobre – * Date reportée en raison de DANA à Valence
6 novembre – *
13 novembre – *
20, 25 et 27 novembre
4, 11, 16 (lundi) et 18 décembre


Places limitées

Les personnes intéressées doivent envoyer une brève lettre de motivation à reserves_ext@ivam.es, avec pour objet POLIGLOTIA. Date limite d’inscription : jusqu’au lundi 14 octobre. Une fois les participants sélectionnés, tous les participants inscrits seront informés de la décision. L’acceptation de participation au groupe implique un engagement à assister à toutes les sessions.

La lettre de motivation doit contenir les informations suivantes :

· Nom et prénom(s)

· Quel est votre niveau d’espagnol ?

· Quelles langues parlez-vous ?

· Quels sont vos loisirs, vos centres d’intérêt ?

· Pouvez-vous assister aux séances de l’IVAM le mercredi de 17 à 19 heures

AccessibilityPoliglotíaIVAM Centre Julio González

POLIGLOTIA is a programme conceived as a creative, multidisciplinary process arising from the different languages and cultural practices in Valencia. We also see it as a space for meeting and mediation, in and with the museum, from a hybrid, intercultural perspective. We support the generation of content through participatory listening and the exchange of experiences and knowledge for the mutual enrichment of different groups made up of people with different backgrounds. We use their motivations and skills as the basis to build up a friendly, changeable space.
The programme is coordinated by Paco Inclán, a writer and teacher of Spanish to migrants and refugees, in collaboration with our department of activities and education. POLIGLOTIA finds inspiration in the atmosphere of a language class in terms of the will to understand and tell, the possibility of approaching other world views through language and relationships between people with their many diversities sharing the same space.

POLIGLOTIA 2021/22
In our first season we set up the Grupo de Estudios Políglotas, a platform for mediation using the twelve native languages of its members. We also organised a monthly programme of activities open to the public to transmit the idiosyncracy of POLIGLOTIA.

We ended with Inventario (The museum thinks together), esto enlaza aquí https://ivam.es/es/actividades/inventario-poliglotia/. Here, members created practices and dynamics through their different ways of doing, feeling and communicating, questioning and reinventing the museum.

POLIGLOTIA 2023. School of Diverse Knowledge

2023 began with the Escuela de Saberes Diversos, a meeting space and (self-)educational cycle where participants are introduced to issues of mediation and museum dynamics, also from an intercultural perspective.

POLIGLOTÍA 2024. Narrative Laboratory

Reading, orality and writing will be the axes around which the sessions of this laboratory revolve, which aim to generate a space for mediation and creation in the museum through the oral and written word, as a continuation and development of the School of Diverse Knowledge and from popular exhibition.

POLIGLOTÍA. Spanish classes starting at the museum

Sessions where IVAM exhibitions and facilities will serve as teaching resources for learning Spanish. The mother tongues of the participants will also play a leading role in these multilingual meetings, making the museum a space to encourage dialogue and the exchange of knowledge and experiences from a pedagogical approach of cultural and linguistic diversity.

ExhibitionIVAM Centre Julio González

The project consists of a duo exhibit by Senga Nengudi (1943, Chicago) and Maren Hassinger (1947, Los Angeles). For the first time in a Spanish museum, the close friendship and collaboration between both artists will be worked on, which originated with the experiences of Studio Z in Los Angeles and continued for more than five decades since the 70s, through installations, texts, sculptures, performances and video projects. The starting point will be two short, but very important, texts from the artists: Manifesto (Maren Hassinger, 2006) and Maren and I (Senga Nengudi, 2009), present in the room as a preamble to the exhibit. Since the 1970s, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger have worked together to create a rich corpus of works including installations, performances, video, texts and sculptures. They have been co-authors and have participated in each other’s performances on numerous occasions, in addition to being members of Studio Z. The nature of these collaborations has been based on an open, improvisational and exploratory attitude between each other’s art and, at the same time, they were a means to reflect on the need to affirm a new cultural identity. The framework pursued in the project will show how, despite being on the sidelines, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger fostered individual and collective modes of expression through self-determination and networks of mutual care and support. The two artists held space for each other as a means of survival through their friendships, their complex emerging identities, and their experiences of shared political realities. The open and improvisational artistic spirits of Nengudi and Hassinger have been and continue to be an inspiration and a reminder that art can bring people and communities together. Their works are deeply rooted in collaboration and often consist of events that bring together people from different backgrounds and generations. Throughout their production, Nengudi and Hassinger have opposed the apparatuses and systems of power that often regulate productive and innovative cultural exchange; and they have done so by analysing multiculturalism through the lens of blackness and offering an approach based on collaboration. They have produced an extensive body of work that places the issues of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history, and performance front and centre.   COLLABORATES:

Videos

CollectionExhibitionIVAM Centre Julio González

The exhibit dedicated to Gabriel Cualladó (Massanassa, Valencia, 1925 – Madrid, 2003) is based on an exhaustive investigation of this author’s assets present in the IVAM Collection. Adding to this large set of works (around 445 photographs) is the photographer’s archive and library, and a series of polaroids made up of more than 600 pieces; furthermore, slides made by the photographer towards the end of his career are included and show his experimentation with colour, something unique in his work.

This exhibit aims to look at Cualladó’s universe starting at its origins, making visible his work as a photographer, but also as a collector, writer and editor. His archive (made up of correspondence, brochures, invitations and many other documents) and his fantastic library, unique in Spain, allow us to build not only on his work, but also the history and development of photography in Spain; from amateur associations to the official recognition of photography as an artistic genre, for which he was awarded the National Photography Prize in 1994.

The exhibit will include documents and unpublished material that will allow the public to know a different perspective of this artist, which will allow a dialogue to be established between his work and works from his own collection deposited at the IVAM by authors such as Diane Arbus, August Sander or Dorothea Lange. This exhibit will follow the complete trajectory of Cualladó’s career based on a large presentation of material that will accompany the photographs and which will also demonstrate his great importance in the Spanish context and his ability to establish connections on an international level

Videos

Julio González Prize 2024

ExhibitionIVAM Centre Julio González

The multidisciplinary practice of Simone Fattal (Damascus, 1942) conceptualizes time as an elastic entity that transcends the distinctions between past, present, and future. Her work draws from mythology, spanning from ancient Egypt to Sunni mysticism and Greco-Roman tradition, creating archetypal figures that integrate historical narratives into the present.

Fattal’s work, predominantly sculptural, unfolds in a multicultural and nomadic space distinct from official history. This space transports the viewer to a “historical place” of an almost archaeological, multilingual, and polytheistic nature, which nevertheless exists and manifests in the present.

Through mediums such as sculpture, painting, and photography, Fattal explores the boundaries of figuration, inspired by historical figures from the Mediterranean, creating a cosmogony of resilient bodies and architectures. Her sculptures, made of bronze, clay, or stoneware, evoke literature, Sumerian tales, Arab epics, and Sufi poetry. Angels, centaurs, heroes, and gods mingle with architectural ruins and figures of fruits and animals, alluding to the loss of historical sites such as Palmyra or Aleppo. These works, timeless and simultaneously archaic and modern, reflect on humanity and its place in the world and history.

Fattal has been awarded the Julio González International Prize 2024 for her contribution to contemporary art. To mark the occasion, IVAM will organize an exhibition curated by Nuria Enguita and Rafael Barber, which will review the main lines of work of this Franco-Lebanese artist. A catalogue will be published in conjunction with the exhibition, including texts by the curators and contributions from professionals such as Jacqueline Burckhardt and Omar Kholeif.

Simone Fattal, born in Syria in 1942 and raised in Lebanon, studied philosophy in Paris and established herself as an artist in Beirut. After the Lebanese Civil War, she moved to California, where she founded The Post-Apollo Press. She resumed her artistic practice in 1988 at the San Francisco Art Institute, focusing on sculpture and ceramics. Her work has been exhibited internationally at renowned institutions such as MOMA PS1 (2019); Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne (2019); Punta Della Dogana, Pinault Collection, Venice (2019); Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen (2020); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2021); ICA Milan, Milan (2021); La Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); 16th Lyon Biennale, Lyon (2022); 12th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2022); TBA21 Academy, Ocean Space, Venice (2023); Portikus, Frankfurt (2023); Secession, Vienna (2024).

Videos

ExhibitionIVAM Centre Julio González

Juana Francés (Alicante, 1924 – Madrid, 1990) began her artistic activity in the 1950s, when the first symptoms of artistic renewal started to appear in Francoist Spain. Establishing connections with the avant-garde circles that gathered in Madrid, Juana Francés was the only female member of El Paso, a group born under the influence of American Abstract Expressionism and its gestural and material violence. However, she left the group in 1957, precisely because of the contempt for her art and her condition as a woman shown by some of the other members at a time when art was still an area dominated by men.

Until 1960, Juana produced works in which she aggregated different textures, sober colours (blacks, whites and earth tones) and new materials like river sands. From 1963, and for nearly twenty years, she produced her series El hombre y la ciudad (Man and the City), a depiction of a stifling and distressing human environment resulting from the growing industrialisation and economic development in urban Spain after the application of the Stabilisation Plan of 1959. Later, in the 1980s, the artist returned to abstraction. Between 1986 and 1990, the year of her death, she produced her series Fondos Submarinos (Submarine Depths), Cometas (Comets) and Escudos (Shields), where she experimented once more with material and gesture in an attempt to transfer movement to the support, drawing inspiration from the cosmos or the depths of the sea, and using the circle and rectangle as principal motifs.

This exhibition attempts to break down and delve into the different fragments of Juana Francés’s artistic career not only through her own words and writings, but also through the study and monitoring of her creative process. It provides, therefore, a more intimate and personal view of the artist, while recovering the memory of her exhibitions, framing her work in the time table of our own history.

The exhibition at the IVAM Centre Julio González is the culmination of the centenary of the artist’s birth and concludes the itinerancy of this ambitious exhibition after its presentation at the IVAM in Alcoi and the Centro Niemeyer in Avilés. Furthermore, this new show devoted to the work of Juana Francés will offer the opportunity to enjoy artworks that have not been exhibited before.

Videos