Exhibitions 2013

The goal of this project is to open a two-way channel of communication between Nantes and Gijón. This hitherto unexplored path has given rise to an exhibition in two venues -Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto (through September 15th) and LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (through September 29th)- which is showcasing four works of art created during a production residency. Curated by: Alfredo Aracil & Frédéric Emprou Participating artists: Neal Beggs, Regina Dejiménez at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, Fran Meana at Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto

Traslaciones touches on two kinds of translations. Firstly, a type of movement: the physical projection of a body which, despite changing position, remains identical in space and in time; and secondly to a transformation on a symbolic level: when the need to translate from one language to another becomes a desert which cannot be mapped. The works on view take different approaches to exploring space and time. They are different ways of trying to understand the world and, at once, of trespassing the boundaries of representation. Curated by: Alfredo Aracil & Frédéric Emprou Participating artists: Neal Beggs, Regina Dejiménez at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle, Fran Meana at Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto

Regina Dejiménez (Madrid, 1984) The installation Reinos en traslación: el cobre [Realms in translation: copper] is based on a search for the different uses of copper, an element whose origins are shrouded in mythology, as well as mankind’s alternative futures in this and other planets throughout the course of history. By means of documentation extracted from various historical, poetical and scientific registers in the form of texts, sculptural pieces and copper etching plates, the artist creates a narration which at once hides different stories: a borderland that intertwines different traditions and knowledge, in search of meeting points, ideas, facts and representations.

Neal Beggs (Belfast, 1959) examines sound’s capacity to organize itself through objects with sculptural qualities while at once proposing an analogy between the geophysical and historical context of Gijón. This set of pieces uncovers a sentient idea of the rugged Atlantic coastline. The crossing by boat between Nantes and Gijón is thus transformed into an evocative form suffused with a phantasmagorical presence. The idea of translation is incarnated in the middle of this real displacement between two points, a western fiction as a way of revisiting its myths and its present. A bridge orchestrated with a song called Red River Valley which Woody Guthrie versioned to speak about the International Brigades.

Fran Meana (Avilés, 1982) presents an installation comprising a text transformed into an image, the hanging jacket of an absent body and four soundtracks, each relayed through a different speaker, which recreate the space of a conversation. The narration takes it starting point from the classic science-fiction novel 'A Woman in the Edge of Time' by Marge Piercy, continuing the dialogue between its two main characters: a woman from the present and another from the not-so-distant future. Two bodies, which are absent yet have a voice, take part in a reflection on the translation from our time to the future and from image to sound, from physical presence to absence.

Bevis Martin (London, 1975) & Charlie Youle (Sheffield, 1977) mines the resources of fabLAB Asturias at LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial, provoking a confrontation between new technologies and conventional formats of representation, yet not without a certain ironic backwards gaze on the history of art, in an exploration into forms and models using pieces from various museums in Gijón. Taking the geometric definition of translation literally, their work becomes a confusion of perspectives, a way of understanding the sculptural potential with which the two artists create and maintain an artifice, defending uncertainty in the different dimensions of space.

The Moon Museum was an alleged secret project carried out by NASA in 1969 which consisted of placing on the surface of the moon six artworks made expressly for the project by various North American artists from the 1960s. These were John Chamberlain, Forrest Myers, David Novros, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. Without being able to check if it was put into practice, Karlos Gil rescued what might have been the first 'Space Art' work in history and captured it in an installation which can be visited from June at LABoral. The Moon Museum presents a narrative construction through overlapping stories, photographs and souvenirs that, combined with the audiovisual and technological material, will show this secret moon museum, based on a traditional science-fiction story, creating a museum within another one: in LABoral.

Cartographies to Anticipate a Movement is part of the programme Universo vídeo, a proposal which carried out a research on the state of video art. With the goal of rethinking the centrality of images in the contemporary world, explores also how they are currently produced and diffused. This new selection of films from the Le Fresnoy, the second after An Image of the World in Motion, holdings draws a map of the various ways of addressing landscape. By focusing their camera on a number of both urban and natural spaces, the eight artists on exhibit bring the successive strata of the territory to the surface. Given the mimetic and yet poetic quality of the representation of moving images, this show is about complementary mental and descriptive ways of reading a place and its features: buildings, streets, rocks, trees, or shores. And also hidden or invisible spaces that operate as hinge points between the particular and the modern endeavour to standardise the image of the world, like blind spots that at once unite and separate, making a show of imposing limits and boundaries while at the same time erasing them. Maps stand in opposition to the exact replica, the identical. Just like the films on show here, maps speak through a performative approach to reality, in other words, one that is possible to dismantle and to modify. In consequence, seeing again is more than just returning to the same. Likewise, reproducing is not just a case of reproducing in order to establish the same once again. ARTISTS: Pauline Delwaulle, Laura Huertas Millán, Jeanne Lafon, HeeWon Lee, Laurent Mareschal, Momoko Seto, Ana Vaz y João Vieira Torres

In Planet A, 2008, science fiction acts as the vehicle for this cartographic and naturalist story which, behind the description and representation of the future territory, conceals a protest against the environmental reality of our planet. A critique balancing the impossibility of reversing the disaster with the responsibility of knowing that we ourselves are partially to blame.

Ligne verte, 2005, filmed as if it were a TV documentary on painting, where the camera scans a painting from top to bottom and from right to left, stopping at every detail while an off-screen voice explains its symbolism. An enclosed space: the wall dividing Palestine from Israel. A trompe l’oeil that, in the name of security, supposedly isolates violence from peace, the First World from need.

In L'Île, 2012, the sea is a uniform space where all references are foreclosed and, as such, ruled by a sense of disorientation. On the horizon, the sky intermingles with the volume of the earth. With their differently coloured lines and shapes, maps are also sprinkled with names and numbers that measure, regulate and name the space. For this reason, power denies man’s dream of sailing into the unknown. Cartography organises the landscape.

In Ici, là-bas et Lisboa, 2012,writing at a micro scale through a darkness in which we negotiate with our sight thanks to a halo that casts light on what seems to be the inside of a print.Their houses are no longer homes, but ruins no one can ever return to. At the end of the day, the only home we know is our own language. Everything else is scars covering an abyss inside our memory.

In Phone Tapping, 2009, based on a series of telephone conversations about ghosts, the sound seems to float free from the image, hemmed in by skyscrapers.Thus, a sort of physical yet also sentimental map is drawn, one that ultimately reveals the immaterial nature of the successive layers of information organising life in our cities.

In Aequador, 2012, the architectural ruins of the dream of reason in the midst of the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, as if it were a post-apocalypse Brasilia, comment on a time charged with momentum and with its own unfolding, beyond history and space.This exuberant, though endangered, nature is turned into a fetish, and threatens to devour the last remnants of the misnomer civilisation, returning us to the violent character of our existence as human community.

In Fata Morgana, 2012, Jeanne Lafon takes us to a space and a time removed from history, a world where what is real is the migration in between spaces, with the waves and the water as backdrop sound. Long shots confront us with the horizon and a sky where the shining sun seems to be playing hide and seek. There is an attempt to map nature, the territory, the cycles and the lines of force that move the time strings of the Earth.

In Entre temps, 2012, a lost little girl walks among the cars parked in this city that is none in particular and at once all cities.Its vanishing lines return us, time and again, to the same place: walking in circles struggling to fix the territory on a map that will never be the exact replica or identical space, only an imagining. Caught between the memory’s power to fix and the poetic yet treacherous fantasy of the imagination, when faced with the recurrent images of streets, cities and buildings, spectators develop the ability to recall and to wander once again through their dreams and nightmares.

Elastic Reality opens almost twenty years after the beginnings of Internet and about fifteen years since the advent of mass-market mobile telephony. These two technological innovations have profoundly changed our perception of the world we live in. Indeed, we now live permanently connected, in a time/space that is constantly redefined - a sort of uchronia in which this perception evolves with the increasingly fast flow of information transmitted from everywhere, and whose authors, whether known or not, are just as much professionals and experts as they can be our next-door neighbour, or a hacker ensconced in front of his screen: we participate in the making of a collective realm that has become global, and fragmented. Artists: Théodora Barat, Veronique Beland, Pierre-Yves Boisramé, Vincent Ciciliato, Maya Da-Rin, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Joachim Olender, Zahra Poonawala, David Rokeby and Dorothée Smith.

Zahra Poonawala (Geneva, Switzerland, 1983) reflects on audio and visual relationships between the part and the whole, between production and perception of sound. Tutti, 2012, places the viewer in the position of an explorer. From the "acousmoniums" speaker orchestras, the work seeks to realize a more dynamic listening using the movement. From a chord base, the reaction to the movements of the viewer determines the intensity changes and releases that detach themselves from the sound mass. The motion of the system always remains constant, a visual or audible, changing balances and prospects.

Sans titre consists of a cable-car bounded by three screens. The static thing of one is outlined for the path of others. A landscape that moves to and from to the pace of the movement rattling of the cabin. The spectral presence of this one propagates on the screens, when the cabin turns she itself into receptacle of the projection of the displacement. There surprises investment, the unremovable thing, the mountain, is the one that moves when the object destined to move remains still. The origin of the movement gets lost in the set, simultaneously unstably and fixedly. (15.03.2013-08.09.2013)

The work of Ryoichi Kurokawa (Osaka, Japan, 1978) is a stream of images and sounds in eternal motion where the notion of synesthesia is central, trying to relate sensory. Mol, 2012, takes its title from the chemical symbol. Mirrors and holographic projections exploring the question of representation and perception. A digital molecular forms which multiply endlessly on two screens, forming a spatial arrangement toward the body of the viewer is drawn.

In Yabuki-machi, 2012, Mitsuaki Saito revisits Fukushima with the eyes of someone who is looking for the gloss of the new, for a rebirth in repetition.

Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the advent of video technology, the program retrieves LABoral Universo video, with the approaching currently in production and distribution of motion pictures. (15.03.2012-02.06.2013) Experimental Practices: An image of the world in motion, a selection of films Le Fresnoy funds, aims to draw an overall picture. Like the film or video, the ultimate objective of the exhibition is to represent the movement of the world from the contingent, giving structure and meaning of his confused state of permanent change, embodied by each of these six films. The pieces work in a unique way: they are perfectly independent.

When they arrived in the New World, the conquistadors had nothing but old words to designate new things. Voyage en la terre autrement dite, 2011, is shot entirely in the Tropical Garden of Lille. A journey to another world without having to go far.

Visites, 2007, the clearly creative state of non-definition following a shock like the one affecting the person involved in a car accident in this piece, covers the most ordinary everyday actions with a patina of novelty and strangeness.

The moving image links together events in a specific fashion: a temporal progression that is always conjugated in the present. In Vide pour l'amour, 2002, there are two parallel stories that, when confronted, seem to enact a play of two times and two places. A play of illusion.

Naufrage, 2008, at the end of the day, one of the mandates of the moving image, however paradoxical it might sound, was to halt forward motion, in other words, to capture or stop time. As we can see in this film, turning a fall into a moment of suspense, an event.

In the midst of a social tragedy like the aftermath of the earthquake that hit L'Aquila in Italy, it is hard to believe that history keeps on turning along its inevitable orbit. In The mutability of all things and the possibility of changing some, 2012, the continuous transformation from one state to another means the appearance and, at once, the ultimate end of all temporal structures.

Matin de la Saint Antoine, 2012, shows an early morning on 14 June in Lisbon, after the all-night celebrations for the feast day of St Anthony, the city’s patron saint, the metro seems to be full of zombies rather than persons.

La Huella, 2012, shows various photographic documents return the political violence in Peru from past decades to the present. Arranged as if an archive, the work is the formal result of juxtaposing two different voices and memories: the more subjective vision of the artist and the more scientific point of view of the directors of EPAF (Peruvian Forensic Anthropology Team).

To celebrate 50 years since the emergence of the medium, Universo vídeo [Video Universe] approaches current production and distribution of images to open a reflection on the central importance that these hold in the contemporary world. Video is a device for recording the reality that shapes our way of seeing. Throughout its history video has developed a specific language, albeit mutant, which due to its nature as an image has been linked to cinema, photography, television, painting and also performance, having been used to record different performances during the sixties. What is, however, really unique about the medium is its capacity to expand the idea of linear time. Ultimately, this is a technology which allows the image to be simultaneously produced and reproduced. They are images which are consumed live at the service of communication in our global village. For the last four years, LABoral Centro de Arte has held filMO, a pocket film festival made with mobile devices. Its purpose is twofold: to foster the ability to produce images, while at the same time, encourage a certain critical spirit. Universo vídeo_filMO brings together a selection of works from the proposals submitted to this edition and the winning pieces of the last competition. The premise for both editions has been to build bridges towards the tradition of the image, seeking to understand it as a continuum that would span from the first experiments with the phenakistoscope in the 19th century to the photographic plate camera and finally lead to the digital image of mobile telephones; or even, the Gijón International Film Festival, which was used as an improvised set in its most recent edition. The presented pieces show the more conventional idea of narration on one hand, and have an experimental approach on the other. In other words, at one end, we have documentary and reality – the most recurrent perspective to tell stories whether fiction or non-fiction – and at the other, investigation into forms and ways to represent movement and time.