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).
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.
To close the 2023/24 course of the POLIGLOTÍA program, we invite you to join us in this open-door session aimed especially at people who are learning Spanish and people interested in processes of cultural and linguistic diversity.
We will present the publication of the POLIGLOTÍA Narrative Laboratory and we will count with the intervention of the participants in the Spanish language classes, which are based on the IVAM exhibitions.
POLIGLOTIA is a space that welcomes groups of diverse nature that “inhabit” the museum and interact with its exhibition proposal. The project is led by Paco Inclán with the mediation support of Gema Gil.
Participants 2023/24
Spanish classes: Anastasiia Barei, Wadj Beshara, Sonali Fernando, Alexey Gostyukhin, Gosia Kościelska, Lena Laba, Samia Ledjouada, Anton Mezentsev, Toshiko Miyahara, Ufuk Navarro, Olha Rode, Oleksandr Pavliuchenko, Aizhan Saganayeva, Ni Song, Lichun Xie, Li Zhang.
Narrative Laboratory: Mariana Bandeira, Andrea Bednarczyk, Neus Berenguer, Nancy Carrillo, Medes Colubi, Victoria Fernández, Sandra González, Leonardo Jiménez, Kristin Hansen, Soledad Martín, Saba Moradi, Noemi Neri, Oleksandr Pavlov, Davide Perrulli, Chabe Rollán, Francesco Rondelli, Diego Silipo, Jose Vaquerizo.
This exhibition explores the development of the photographic image of Nobosudru, a Mangbetu woman, taken in the north-eastern part of the Congo by G. Specht and L. Poirier, who were responsible for the photographic and cinematographic shots of the famous Citroën automobile crossing known as La Croisière Noire (1924-1925). Directed by G. M. Haardt and L. Audoin-Dubreuil, it crossed Africa from Algeria to Cape Town. Very soon, the profile image of Nobosudru with her characteristic headdress, which was only a status marker but was falsely taken as an ethnic sign of all Mangbetu women, became an icon of Black Africa. The use of this image in the most diverse practices and social contexts, as well as its different material supports, all of which are present in the exhibition, led to its formal and semantic mutation from the 1920s to the present day.
The exhibition allows the visitor to see a wealth of documentation from numerous archives and museums, mainly European, as well as private collections: the expedition’s memory albums, the film of La Croisière Noire and the posters in various languages advertising it, the scientific and popular books in which the image was reproduced, the advertising of consumer products, fashion magazines, decorative painting and sculpture, jewellery and costume jewellery, and so on. Uses of this image underpinned by an exoticist point of view in keeping with the colonial period. But this exhibition also shows the paradox that this same image has had an anti-racist political meaning in other contexts, as shown by its propagandistic use in documents of cultural resistance or in some appropriations from contemporary art, including film. That this colonial image continues its journey, when criticism of colonialism abounds, is perhaps explained by an ambivalent attitude that mixes in varying proportions both rejection of that period and a certain melancholy. Through condensation and displacement, mechanisms typical of dreamlike elaboration, Nobosudru remains a symbolic field where, today as yesterday, the expressions of different post-memories compete.
Through a case analysis, this exhibition is situated at the crossroads of different disciplines: visual anthropology, the history of political representations, aesthetics and the pragmatic theory of the image.
This innovative exhibition will juxtapose the lives and work of two of the most important and influential practitioners in the history of photography. Showcasing more than 150 rare vintage prints, the exhibition will span the entire career of Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron – who worked 100 years apartand include examples of both their best known and less familiar work. In ways that tantalisingly intersect and diverge, portraiture was fundamentally imortant to the artistic project of both women. This exhibition will explore the idea that Woodman and Cameron share an engagement with portraiture as a ‘dream space’. The title makes reference to the idea that these photgraphic portraits are not intended to mimic reality, but conjure notions of imagination, beauty, symbolism, transformation and storytelling. Considering both artists in a different light, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In will propose new ways of appreciating and thinking about the artists, portraiture and the relationships between 19th and 20th century photographic practices.
The exhibiton will be accompanied by a catalogue, Francesca Woodman and Julia Margaret Cameron: Portraits to Dream In, by curator Madgalene Keaney, including essays and contributions from the curator of the Woodman Family Foundation, Katarina Jerinic, and leading photography historian, Helen Ennis.
Confluences. Between the archive and the intervention is an exhibition proposal that accounts, archives and updates what has happened since 2021 in various locations with less than one hundred inhabitants in the Valencian Community within the Confluències program. Likewise, it shows twelve new interventions and pieces by the team of artists generated specifically for the IVAM G7.
In the archive section, a wide variety of materials are displayed on the actions and experiences carried out in collaboration with the people involved in the different municipalities of the program: artists, local agents, neighbors and other living beings that inhabit it. The objective is to strengthen the networks generated through the visibility of the interventions; a potential tool to sustain dialogues and exchanges. The documentary of the process made by La Cosecha Comunicación is included.
In the rest of the room, new interventions and works are distributed that dialogue with previous processes in various directions: some delve into aspects only previously noted, others focus on methodologies, and others rescue discarded materials. In this way, the exhibition invites us to generate new reflections, readings and imaginaries of the pieces produced in the territory and enable, in turn, renewed comings and goings.
The artists who have participated in Confluències are: Bleda y Rosa, Carlos Izquierdo, Fent Estudi, La Cuarta Piel, Laura Palau, Lola Zoido, LUCE, Makea Tu Vida, Pep Vidal, Pilar Beltrán, Rubén García and Sandra Mar. Through His works invite us to reflect on the landscape, care, depopulation, uses and abuses of the territory, identity, memory, gaps, ecosocial challenges and how all these issues affect us from the places where we live.
*Confluències, artistic interventions in rural areas is a program framed in the line of work of l’IVAM al territori, which has developed since autumn 2021 a network of actions, mediations and artistic interventions in the twenty-four smallest towns in the Community Valencian. The artistic interventions of Confluències can be visited in: Alto Mijares (Espadilla, Fuentes de Ayódar, Torralba del Pinar, Torrechiva, Vallat and Villamalur), Commonwealth of Alto Palancia (Fuente la Reina, Higueras, Matet, Pavías, Sacañet and Villanueva de Viver) , Els Ports (Castell de Cabres, Herbers, Palanques, Vallibona and Villores), province of València (La Puebla de San Miguel, Carrícola and Sempere), and El Comtat (Benillup, Binimassot, Famorca and Tollos). The twenty-four towns, with a population of less than one hundred inhabitants, are part of Route 99.
ENG
POLIGLOTÍA opens its doors to people who currently study Spanish (B, intermediate levels). In the sessions, the IVAM exhibitions and facilities will serve as teaching resources for language learning. The mother tongues of the participants will also play a leading role in these multilingual meetings. An exploration of the possibilities of the museum as a space to promote dialogue and the exchange of knowledge and experiences from a pedagogical approach of cultural and linguistic diversity.
Sessions
May 21 and 28
June 4, 11, 18 and 25
July 2 and 9
LIMITED PLACES
To register, send an email to educacio@ivam.es until May 10 with this information:
Commitment to attendance is valued
Confluences. Between the archive and the intervention is an exhibition proposal that accounts, archives and updates what has happened since 2021 in various locations with less than one hundred inhabitants in the Valencian Community within the Confluències program. Likewise, it shows twelve new interventions and pieces by the team of artists generated specifically for the IVAM G7.
In the archive section, a wide variety of materials are displayed on the actions and experiences carried out in collaboration with the people involved in the different municipalities of the program: artists, local agents, neighbors and other living beings that inhabit it. The objective is to strengthen the networks generated through the visibility of the interventions; a potential tool to sustain dialogues and exchanges. The documentary of the process made by La Cosecha Comunicación is included.
In the rest of the room, new interventions and works are distributed that dialogue with previous processes in various directions: some delve into aspects only previously noted, others focus on methodologies, and others rescue discarded materials. In this way, the exhibition invites us to generate new reflections, readings and imaginaries of the pieces produced in the territory and enable, in turn, renewed comings and goings.
The artists who have participated in Confluències are: Bleda y Rosa, Carlos Izquierdo, Fent Estudi, La Cuarta Piel, Laura Palau, Lola Zoido, LUCE, Makea Tu Vida, Pep Vidal, Pilar Beltrán, Rubén García and Sandra Mar. Through His works invite us to reflect on the landscape, care, depopulation, uses and abuses of the territory, identity, memory, gaps, ecosocial challenges and how all these issues affect us from the places where we live.
As part of the presentation and subsequent inauguration of the exhibition Un contínuum común indefinidamente liso (An endlessly smooth common continuum), curator Diana Guijarro will give the talk Hardcore continuum. A meeting that will serve as a prelude to the exhibition and that will invite other links to be generated with the works in the IVAM Collection and its exhibition space.
The curatorial proposal delves into more than 100 works from the IVAM Collection that are connected with other pieces from the La Caixa Collection and the MUSAC Collection to project other views towards the contemporary. An exercise through which to analyze artistic, social and cultural contexts from another point of view; reviewing and revisiting various events that can be traced throughout the works and that reveal to us the impulses that manage to risk the identity of the story.
The exhibition uses the pieces as a necessary guiding thread that helps us reflect on various topics, such as the changing nature of the museum institution, the role of the artist and his identity, or the anticipations of various movements that changed our responses to art.
In a current moment in which official contemporaneity is an era with hardly any time and established elements, we find ourselves witnessing a strange simultaneity of events in which things do not begin or end, but remain in a constant reverberation.
This exhibition is configured as a tool that gives us the opportunity to generate other readings of the works and that makes it possible to become new traffickers of symbols to discover that the interesting thing is not to define what is contemporary but to discover when it is.
Diana Guijarro is an independent curator and teacher. His research activity has focused on the study of exhibition spaces, analyzing the conceptualization of their discourses and the different museographic elements, understanding them as a field full of resources.
Un contínuum común indefinidamente liso (An endlessly smooth common continuum)
7:00 p.m. Presentation
8:00 p.m. Opening and cocktail
Within the framework of the Llorenç Barber exhibition. Listening Archive, we organize this day, curated by Lorenzo Sandoval and Montserrat Palacios, which reviews and updates the artist’s work.
Barber’s work is a continuous summoning of the relationships of the living. The title of this lecture session is taken, first of all, from one of his original city concerts, which refers to an inscription present on a bell. The second part comes from one of his pieces: Ex Humiitas Sonus. Obice sonata for waters and flute(s) (1978) Both indicate the importance of the notion of ecosystem in Llorenç Barber’s practice.
Both the city and the outdoors are active agents in the practice of this unique musician and artist, who understands spaces not as backgrounds on which to act, but as elements that participate in the acoustic production of his proposals. The conference by Siegfried Zielinski offer us various entry points into the artist’s work, from ecology and city music.
PROGRAM
6:00 p.m. – About the city as a music box, instrument and open space-time machine. Siegfried Zielinski
We invite you to join us in the presentation and subsequent inauguration of Pinazo: identities, a new reading of the work of the artist Ignacio Pinazo Camarlench.
The curator and professor of Art History Vicente Pla will give a conference prior to the opening in which he will give us some of the keys to this exhibition. The exhibition will open in the Pinazo room, recently restored, which houses the Christian-Mudejar wall.
Pinazo: identities proposes a new reading of Pinazo’s work as an artist who, consciously and systematically, dedicated a good part of his reflections, his work process and his work to the representation of people, in their individual and collective dimensions. and genealogical, as transmitters, receivers and interpreters of identities. The proposal would be materialized by deploying this approach across three areas in each of which representational problems would intersect with different regimes of implicit temporalities, political contexts, ways of doing things and gestures.
The IVAM Collection will provide the most important part of the works on display: foreseeably about 50 paintings plus around 100 drawings, which would be complemented by another 20 and 50 respectively from the Pinazo House-Museum, an amount to be determined, but not greater than 20 in total, of paintings and drawings lent by the Academy of Fine Arts of San Carlos in Valencia and a few paintings from private Valencian collections. An important visual role is also proposed for some of the artist’s unpublished texts.
Vicente Pla Vivas (Sagunt, 1962) is a professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Valencia. Specialized in the problems generated by images during the historical processes of implementation of modernity, in the study and interpretation of the European graphic image widely disseminated during the 19th century, as well as Valencian art from the final decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century and photography.
Pinazo: identities
7:00 p.m. Presentation
8:00 p.m. Opening and cocktail
ENG
POLIGLOTÍA opens its doors to people who currently study Spanish (B, intermediate levels). In the sessions, the IVAM exhibitions and facilities will serve as teaching resources for language learning. The mother tongues of the participants will also play a leading role in these multilingual meetings. An exploration of the possibilities of the museum as a space to promote dialogue and the exchange of knowledge and experiences from a pedagogical approach of cultural and linguistic diversity.
Sessions
May 21 and 28
June 4, 11, 18 and 25
July 2 and 9
LIMITED PLACES
To register, send an email to educacio@ivam.es until May 10 with this information:
Commitment to attendance is valued
ESP
POLIGLOTÍA abre sus puertas a personas que actualmente estudian español (niveles B, intermedios). En las sesiones, las exposiciones y las instalaciones del IVAM servirán como recursos didácticos para el aprendizaje del idioma. Las lenguas maternas de los y las participantes también tendrán su protagonismo en estos encuentros plurilingües. Una exploración de las posibilidades del museo como espacio para favorecer el diálogo y el intercambio de saberes y experiencias desde un enfoque pedagógico de diversidad cultural y lingüística.
Sesiones
21 y 28 de mayo
4, 11, 18 y 25 de junio
2 y 9 de julio
PLAZAS LIMITADAS
Para inscribirse envía un correo a educacio@ivam.es hasta el 10 de mayo con esta información:
Se valora compromiso de asistencia
FR
POLIGLOTIA ouvre ses portes aux personnes qui étudient actuellement l’espagnol (niveaux B, intermédiaire). Au cours des sessions, les expositions et les installations de l’IVAM serviront de ressources pédagogiques pour l’apprentissage de la langue. Les langues maternelles des participants joueront également un rôle prépondérant dans ces rencontres multilingues. Une exploration des possibilités du musée en tant qu’espace pour promouvoir le dialogue et l’échange de connaissances et d’expériences à partir d’une approche pédagogique de la diversité culturelle et linguistique.
Sessions
21 et 28 mai
4, 11, 18 et 25 juin
2 et 9 juillet
PLACES LIMITÉES
Pour vous inscrire, envoyez un courriel à educacio@ivam.es jusqu’au 10 mai avec les informations suivantes:
Un engagement d’assiduité serait un atout
