Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

Using not only sculpture, drawing and performance but also writing and pedagogical formats, Otobong Nkanga (Kano, Nigeria, 1974) analyses the notion of ‘earth’ as a geological and discursive formation. She often starts from the systems and procedures used locally to excavate raw materials, processing them technologically and distributing them on a global scale. From this point, she follows the threads that bind together the minerals, material culture and the construction of desire with the redistribution of power and knowledge.

Nkanga’s monographic exhibition will include drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances through which the artist examines our social and topographical relationship with our everyday environment. By exploring the notion of earth as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative significance to social ideas of identity. She also shows the inherent complexities of natural resources and their potential values in order to provoke narratives or histories related to earth.

Stones, cloths and plants are other materials that Otobong Nkanga uses in her installations, permitting her to speak of the earth and the people who inhabit it. The works are always intended metaphorically as symbols of the global system, involving images of migration, transformation, appropriation and loss.

The artist will carry out a site-specific project for Gallery 1 at the IVAM.

From October 2021 to June 2023 our first edition of Art i Context included more than 25 proposals in the form of workshops, conferences, performances, mediations or collaborations in different spaces, inside and outside the museum and online, creating connections between different layers in Valencia and its context. In [DOSMILVINT-I-U] [DOSMILVINT-I-TRES] = 1 encuentro ([TWENTY-TWENTY] [TWENTY-TWENTY-THREE] = 1 encounter), we present work by artists during the course of the programme.

The members of the first edition of Art i Context were Diego Navarro and Darío Alva, Claudia Dyboski, Marina González Guerreiro, Álvaro Porras and M Reme Silvestre. Their practices can be seen as a reaction to the instability of the current moment and to the abstraction of contemporary reality. They use digital tools, construct escapist, speculative narratives, revalue manual work and make critical revisions of historical processes. The exhibition is a continuation of the ideas underpinning the programme, which is seen as a generational encounter and a space for interchanging influences and references outside the museum space.

This exhibition is one of many in our opening up of our programme, which is an open, non-conclusive process in which the momentum of works’s gestation can be seen as an element that generates meaning.

Exhibition information

Trascity is a project that reflects on the roles and spaces we occupy and on the objects we accumulate and collect, including images.

This installation, designed specifically for Gallery 3 at the IVAM, adopts different perspectives in attempt to reformulate the uses of the exhibition space, which will be employed as a replica of an existing place in the outside world, a workplace, a meeting point, an area under construction, an archive of images or a storage room for objects from the past. Trascity makes reference to the contemporary problematics of finding a place in the world, a space where we can explore our anxieties and a refuge where some sort of independence can be gained. In this physical space, the artistic artifact becomes a consumer object.

This project reflects upon the concept of the ‘fragment’, understood from multiple points of view. On the one hand, we have a city created out of a mixture of several, with fleeting memories and everyday annotations in the form of photographs that pile up on top of one another to create unstable architectures denoting a world in collapse, accelerated and decadent. On the other hand, there is the mental fragmentation of a visual artist who performs different roles throughout the day with the goal of facing up to a complex and precarious reality. Appearing in this way are the collector, the hoarder, the photographer, the apprentice… Trascity is a synonym for mutating identity, transformation, the ensnaring city, appropriation, popular culture, the memory store, the passage of time or the mise en abyme.

You can listen to the artist’s Playlist here.

Born in Aley (Lebanon) in 1928, Aref El Rayess started to paint at the age of eleven. In 1948, he had his first exhibition in Beirut. From 1948 to 1957, El Rayess travelled between Senegal and Paris, where he started art at the Academy of Fine Arts and trained in the studios of Fernand Léger and André Lhôte, among others. He returned to Lebanon in 1957, and in 1959 was offered a grant to study in Italy. In 1963, the Lebanese government commissioned two sculptures from him to represent Lebanon at the World’s Fair in New York. In 1967, he returned once more to Lebanon, a country then greatly affected by events in the Arab world. He was a founder member of the Department of Fine Arts at the Lebanese university. From then on, El Rayess organised, attended and took part in conferences and exhibitions on politics and art in the Arab world. In 1975, he was invited to Algeria, where he made a series of drawings on the Lebanese civil war, and in 1978, he took part in the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine. During that period, he started to work in Saudi Arabia, where he produced some 13 sculptures in the cities of Jeddah, Tabuk and Riyadh. He lived in Jeddah until 1987, and some years later, in 1992, he returned to Aley in Lebanon, where he lived until his death in 2005.

Aref El Rayess is a fundamental figure in the Lebanese cultural panorama from the 1960s to the 1980s. In its paradoxes and singularity, its flashes and its blind alleys, the oeuvre of Aref El Rayess exemplifies an uncompromising modern artistic career that follows solely the “inner demand” of a concerned subject, more attentive and sympathetic to the political, social and cultural crises of his time than to the “isms” and expected sequences of the modern canon. Precociously talented and largely self-taught, extremely gifted and generally undisciplined, he was an entertaining and often caustic observer, fascinated in his adolescence by timeless “impressions of Africa” that accompanied him throughout his life. El Rayess’s formal career and work evolved mainly in cycles, reiterations and reminiscences, and in the various disciplines he fostered in his turn (drawing, engraving, painting, sculpture, collage).

This exhibition is centred on the years 1958 to 1978, from El Rayess’s return to Beirut after his formative years in Senegal, Paris and Lebanon until the beginnings of the civil war (1975-1990). In many respects, his work of this period is a seismograph that records the frustrated desires and hopes of an era through heterogeneous formal expressions inspired by the insurrection of the Druze people (1958), the Algerian war of independence, the liberation struggles of the “Third World” and the war in Lebanon.

Aref El Rayess chrono-biography