Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Orientalism, by the Palestinian thinker Edward Said (1935-2003), was published in 1978. It revealed how the East was constructed as the counterpart of the West by the discipline that gave the book its title. Orientalism was based on a series of stereotypes that corresponded to the interests of political and economic powers. Those clichés are still maintained today and they define the images of the East that we consume in the West, in the media and in films and advertisements.

This exhibition seeks to analyse and question some of those commonplaces in the images that were produced between the time of the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt and Syria (1798-1801) and 1956, the year when Morocco and Tunisia gained their independence. The show highlights the way in which avant-garde movements established relationships with Oriental “exoticism” in their attempt to break away from the canon of tradition.

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This exhibition presents a survey of various Valencian counter-culture offerings produced between the 1960s and 1980s. It shows how highbrow and lowbrow culture were taken as a basis for proposing alternatives to all the orthodox ideas of the time.

Counter-culture remakes the fictions that a society tells itself. It may not always find the truth, but it does look for alternatives to the official mythologies that attempt to consolidate certain ideas about “us”. In Valencia, in Spain, there were very clear narratives about that “us”, and there was resistance to taking them too seriously. The Mediterranean talent that was glorified by official propaganda had a counterpart in counter-culture, which insisted that things were not necessarily like that. Counter-culture is opposed not only to the contents of official culture but also to its forms. It works with other materials and is found in alternative circuits.

The selection of attitudes that are presented in the exhibition show how art set out to overcome the limitations of political pressures. How the street spoke. How some artists expressed their opposition to the conventions that were imposed on sexuality or education. We shall see proposals for a re-reading of Valencian identity that went far beyond the common clichés. We shall see a society seeking new expressive freedoms and new personal experiences.

Suma y sigue del arte contemporáneo was a fundamental magazine dealing with art criticism and theory during the 1960s. Published by José Huguet and with Vicente Aguilera Cerni as editor between 1962 and 1967, it became a path by which international trends and aesthetic debates were introduced into Spain. Its pages began to insist on the exhaustion of Informalism, and proposals connected with Op Art and Kinetic Art and the new forms of realism were developed. Important art critics such as Giulio Carlo Argan, José María Moreno Galván and Pierre Restany were published in Suma y sigue del arte contemporáneo. The magazine also collaborated very closely with various artists who designed its covers: Equipo Crónica, Monjalés, Manuel Millares, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tàpies and Joan- Josep Tharrats, among others.

Zineb Sedira (Paris, 1963) explores the landscape of Algeria in a very warm, personal way, linking personal experiences with historical or political aspects while at the same time concentrating especially on questions concerning the desire of many of the country’s citizens to move away, to leave.

That is why her photographs, videos and installations are characterised by using the perspective of her own experience to preserve and transmit the memory of the past as a legacy for future generations.

A rather melancholy idea, interweaving the urgency of having to depart with the desire to remain, which often gives rise to a profound feeling of rootlessness, wherever one may be.

In this exhibition, therefore, Zineb Sedira will explore the notions of family, tradition, oral history, migration and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge in order to address the issue of cultural displacement and the personal and social consequences of migration.

The show, curated by Baptiste Brun, comprises a meticulous selection of about two hundred works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and engravings, together with many documents and objects, with which we are able to offer the public an approach to the work of Jean Dubuffet (Le Havre, 1901–Paris, 1985) from a new perspective based on history, culture and anthropology. The project is developed in ten different sections that revolve around three fundamental themes: “Celebration of the Common Man”, “Ethnography in Actuality” and “Criticism of Culture”. The exhibition has been conceived and created by the MuCEM in coproduction with the IVAM and MEG. This project is supported by the Fondation Dubuffet in Paris and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, and also by many European institutions and private collections.