Sharq al-Andalus Hall at Las Claras Convent, Murcia, Spain
November 25th 2008 – January 10th 2009

Opening: November 25th, 12:00 noon
Project organised by Culture and Tourism Department of the Region of Murcia and co-produced by Bancaja

Venue:
Sharq al-Andalus, Museo de Santa Clara
Paseo Alfonso X, 1. 30001 MURCIA
Tf.+34-968272398
Opening hours:
Martes a Sábado: 10:00 – 13:00 y 16:00 – 18:30
Domingos y festivos: 10:00 – 13:00
www.museosantaclara.com | www.espacioav.es

THE SANTA CLARA MUSEUM
Islamic Mirror has found the perfect emplacement in the Sharq al-Andalus hall at the Santa Clara Museum. The Santa Clara convent is an emblematic building which layers Islamic foundations with Christian refurbishments and extensions followed by contemporary restoration which, in 2003, converted its south wing into a museum. At present, the architectural complex combines its use as public space along with the private area for the nuns. The Sharq al-Andalus hall, harking back to the Islamic era, is entered through a central arch that opens onto a central pool and the nuns’ quarters.
The Santa Clara Museum is part of the network of museums run by the Culture and Tourism Dept of the Region of Murcia.

ANISH KAPOOR
Born in Mumbai, India, in 1954, Anish Kapoor has lived in England since the 1970s where he earned a name for himself as one of the most noteworthy exponents of New British Sculpture and one of the top contemporary artists in the world.

Kapoor won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1991 and created the project for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern in 2002. He has taken part at significant international events like Documenta IX in Kassel (1992), and the UK pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1990); besides noteworthy one-person shows at major museums, and fascinating public art projects like the gigantic “CLOUD GATE” opened in 2004 at the Millennium Park in Chicago.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Anish Kapoor’s work is a byword for the power of miscegenation, for spirituality born from sensuality, for the capacity to make the invisible visible and for the cognitive wealth that emerges from the subtle play of opposites: light/darkness; full/empty; earth/sky; body/mind. It can thus be viewed as part of an ongoing search for the mysticism of beauty while taking pleasure in the metaphysical subtlety of matter.

ART DIRECTOR: ROSA MARTINEZ
The project for interventions in the public space is directed artistically by Rosa Martínez, a renowned independent curator who recently curated the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2003), a director of the International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale at the Arsenale (2005), chief curator at the Modern Art Museum of Istanbul (2004- 2007) and author of the exhibition “Chacun à son goût” for the tenth anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2007-2008).

Catalogue: On the occasion of this project, a catalogue edited by Rosa Martinez, published by the Culture and Tourism Department of Murcia has been released.

La entrada Anish Kapoor. Islamic Mirror, Santa Clara Museum, Murcia, Spain, 2008 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Curator: Rosa Martínez

“La Caixa” Foundation’s Madrid Exhibition Hall. January 30th to March 14th, 2004

In his video installations and projections, Navridis makes use of elements that are lightweight such as latex, or ethereal like breath, in order to articulate the relationships of beings with the world. The main theme of his work is air, and his obsession centres on visualising the processes of human breathing as a basic ability of all living beings. What he does could be deemed as “breathe sculpture” given that his characters mould spaces, enact existential tensions and make the invisible visible through breathing. Conceptually, this objective corresponds with that of modern art which endeavours to reflect the impossible or the prohibited from a moral, psychological or physical viewpoint, while also presenting it as something which is possible.

Set against the backdrop of ARCO’04, which has Greece as its guest country, “la Caixa” Foundation’s Madrid Exhibition Hall serves as the venue for an exhibition focused on Navridis’ most representative artistic output over the last ten years, including the Difficult Breaths series which was especially created for the occasion. This exhibition, comprised of five video installations and forty-two photographs, has been curated by Rosa Martínez.

The Nikos Navridis exhibition, organized and produced by “la Caixa” Foundation, can be visited at the “la Caixa” Foundation’s Exhibition Hall in Madrid (C/ Serrano, 60), from January 30th to March 14th, 2004.

Official opening: Thursday, January 29th at 8 p.m.
”La Caixa” Foundation Exhibition Hall
Calle Serrano, 60 (Madrid)
www.fundacio.lacaixa.es
Hours: from Monday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sundays and holidays, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Closed Tuesdays.

Admission free of charge

For further information and graphic materials, please contact Glòria Cid Gerlach.
Communications Department of ”la Caixa” Foundation.
E-mail: gmcid.fundacio@lacaixa.es
Telephone no.: 93 404 61 51. Fax: 93 404 61 16 / 60 80

La entrada Nikos Navridis, La Caixa Foundation, Madrid, España, 2004 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Curator: Rosa Martínez
Reales Atarazanas. Sevilla.
From September 16th to October 31st. 2004

Pilar Albarracín is one of the most significant artists of the contemporary Andalusian scene. Her productions have focused on the analysis of dominant narratives and, specifically, on the clichés which represent Andalusian identity; not from a remote
and intellectualised perspective, but through an emotional and subversive immersion in the anthropology of the everyday.
Folklore and popular traditions, food rituals, religious myths, and women’s role in the distribution of power or collective festivals such as bullfighting, are critically distorted in the mirror of her reflections. Many of her works have a hypnotic rhythm which grows until it reaches a moment of ecstasy. Then the spectator suddenly awakens ‘with a revelation or a thud’ snapping them out of their intellectual and sensorial slumber and forcing them to call into question their preconceptions.

Pilar Albarracín is one of the most significant artists of the contemporary Andalusian scene. Her productions have focused on the analysis of dominant narratives and, specifically, on the clichés which represent Andalusian identity; not from a remote and intellectualised perspective, but through an emotional and subversive immersion in the anthropology of the everyday. Folklore and popular traditions, food rituals, religious myths, and women’s role in the distribution of power or collective festivals such as bullfighting, are critically distorted in the mirror of her reflections. Many of her works have a hypnotic rhythm which grows until it reaches a moment of ecstasy. Then the spectator suddenly awakens ‘with a revelation or a thud’ snapping them out of their intellectual and sensorial slumber and forcing them to call into question their preconceptions.

In all her performances, it is Albarracín herself who personifies the female characters that transform her into a peasant, an immigrant, a battered woman, housewife, flamenco dancer or singer. By putting her personal energy on the line she becomes fully involved in her multiple personalities. From her early interventions such as Sin título. (Sangre en la calle) [Untitled. Blood in the Street] (1992), which featured women thrown out onto the streets of Seville after having suffered some bloody incident, to more recent works such as viva España [Long Live Spain] (2004), which takes place in the streets and squares of Madrid, an unquestionable desire to integrate conscious and unconscious, feeling and reason, body and soul, private and public, runs through Pilar Albarracín’s creations. This is why she plays with the surprise factor and gives interactive installations or improvised performances that are put forward as shock therapy in order to bring out collective demons.

Through her stagings, she focuses on the woman as the repository for commands of submission and explores the different facets of a specific situation of economic and social development in Andalusia, in Spain and, by extension, in the manifold contemporary combats between tradition and modernity. There are several works by Pilar Albarracín that focus on folklore and, specifically, on flamenco, which has been, and remains, an artistic way of expressing the social pain of a people. Most important among them are Prohibido el cante (Singing Prohibited), that was performed in the year 2000, and Muro de jilgueros (Goldfinch Wall), a wall installation created specifically for her exhibition at the Reales Atarazanas in Seville in 2004. If singing gives voice to sorrows, dance connects the body to the rhythms which interweave eroticism and death. Dancing is a way ‘to step outside oneself’ which can be beautifully codified in choreographies and geometries or brings out the shapeless movements that liberate what is repressed, as La cabra [The Goat] (2001) and Bailaré sobre tu tumba [I Will Dance on your Grave] (2004) show.

Artistically, Albarracín’s productions question the absolutist pretensions of minimalism as a hegemonic language and do not subject themselves to the anglosaxon mainstream. Her work connects with the poetics of excess which the baroque, kitsch or pop represent and link up with a Spanish tradition of criticism which contains Goya’s enlightened positions and Valle Inclán’s theatre of the grotesque. Her work reflects the flash of madness, understood as a form of lucidity, and destabilises false identities. It is imbued with a generosity which conceives the work, not as a documentary transcription of what exists, but as a form of
production of thought and life, as a gift which needs a reply from the other, to whom direct or indirect requests are being made for new forms of action, love and conscience, or, in other words, involvement.

Rosa Martínez
Curator of the exhibition

Check PDF:

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La entrada Pilar Albarracín, Reales Atarazanas, Sevilla, 2004 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

UNIVERSAL STRANGERS. 3 exhibitions curated by Rosa Martínez
Filomena Soares Gallery. Lisboa, Portugal. 16 January – 22 February, 2003

Although she describes herself as a painter and has won international recognition thanks to her exquisite abstract canvases embroidered with erotic motifs, Ghada Amer is a multi-talented artist. Drawing, sculpture, installations and garden design are an integral part of her work and are pervaded by the same aesthetic and ideological concerns. The quest for formal beauty, the lack of communication in love relationships, the submission of women to the tyranny of domestic life and the celebration of sexual desire and female pleasure constitute the territory that forms the background against which she constructs her discourses.
Ghada Amer was born in Cairo in 1963, studied Fine Arts in France and today lives in New York. Her changes of geographical, linguistic, aesthetic and emotional location are reflected in her artistic output. Her painting is moulded by the idea of shifting meanings and the appropriation of the languages of abstract expressionism; her drawings evince a questioning of the roles imposed on women; and her urban works unearth the connection between embroidery and gardening as specifically feminine activities. Despite the differences between her Islamic upbringing and the models of behaviour that apply in Western culture, Ghada Amer alludes to universal problems, such as the domination of women, which are prevalent in different cultures.

Her exhibition in the Filomena Soares Gallery in Lisbon is the first one-person show she has put on in Portugal. It brings together intimate drawings and paintings such as The Little Girl, 2001 and Untitled (New Grid), 2000, along with photographs of the gardens that she has designed in various parts of the world: Cactus Painting (Unfinished), 1998, at the Roman Theatre in Sagunto, Valencia; Love Park, 1999, at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA; Women qualities, 2000, at the Busan Metropolitan Museum in Korea; or Hoy el 70% de los pobres del mundo son mujeres, 2001, in the Rambla del Raval in Barcelona. The show is completed by Les Poufs, 2002, a sculpture in the form of a block puzzle, inviting the viewer to play. The surfaces of the cubes are decorated with coloured lines that, when the cubes are put together in the right combination, form images of couples. The idea of chance as a feature of amorous adventures is clearly reflected in this work, which can be seen as a metaphor of her obsessions: displacement, the bella (o impossibile) combinazione in affective relationships, surprise, the happiness of ideal love, and loss, as well as the questioning of identity conceived as something static.

Rosa Martínez

La entrada Ghada Amer, Gallery Filomena Soares, Lisboa, Portugal, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

TIME LOST AND SPACE RETRIEVED (OR VICE VERSA).
Curator: Rosa Martínez. 
Espacio 1. Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Madrid. March 11th – April 27th, 2003.

La entrada Nedko Solakov, Espacio 1 MNCARS, Madrid, Spain, 2003 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

“I WANT YOU TO FEEL THE WAY I DO” INTENSITAT
Curator: Rosa Martínez.
Sala Montcada. La Caixa Foundation. Barcelona, Spain. April 27th to may 23rd, 1993.

Dressed for intensity
I want you to feel the way I do: There’s barbed wire wrapped all around my head and my skin grates on my flesh from the inside. How can you be so comfortable only 5″ to the left of me? I don’t want to hear myself think, feel myself move. It’s not that I want to be numb, I want to slip under your skin: I will listen for the sound you hear, feed on your
thought, wear your clothes.
Now I have your attitude and you ‘re not comfortable anymore. Making them yours you relieved me of my opinions, habits, impulses. I should be grateful but instead… you ‘re beginning to irritate me: I am not going to live with myself inside your body, and I would rather practice being new on someone else.

When I saw The dress (/ want you to feel the way I do) for the first time, I was pierced through by an arrow, both viscerally and intellectually. It has —as does much of Sterbak’s work— an intense perception of the present, a powerful representation of the way we live and feel the passions that agitate, consume, constitute and torment our “matter”. The gradual incandescence which infuses it appears to be a metaphor for the intensities of love, for the dialectic of desire-rejection, for its kindling and extinction. The metal structure of which it is formed alludes to the invisible prisons in which our emotions encarcelate us. The open arms seem to stretch out towards the other, although we can also percieve in them the ambiguity and the fatal destructiveness of the embrace.
The text accompanying the electric dress speaks of the transferences and transitions of identity. To love is to go out of oneself towards the other, but in that journey of desire a “monstrous contradiction” (Hegel) lies concealed, since in love I sacrifice the other in order to be myself, at the same time as the other sacrifices me, converts me into an object, possesses me and attempts to impose his law on me.

Jana Sterbak knows that the Other has several faces: the Other as mirror, the one in whom I am reflected, whom I love and hate, in whom I am doubled and with whom I exchange myself, in whom I long to lose myself in order to find myself, the one who travels through me and with whom I may pass down the tortuous pathways of passion,
whose pleasures are also the prelude to dissatisfaction, pain and death. And the Other who judges, who sanctions my mirror games, that one whom Lacan calls the Great Other, in that he is the guardian of the law and of the symbolic.

Our bodies are always, fatally, the field on which desire and law fight out their battle, the place where we oscillate between the inclination to let ourselves be carried away by the impulses and passions which impel us towards the other, and the tendency to be subjects, to subject and adapt ourselves to the norms which configure the self.

In the work of Jana Sterbak we hear the echoes of these battles, but the opposing forces are not the body and the soul; the antithesis between psychic subjectivity and physiological objectivity has ceased to apply and a new psychosomatic synthesis has taken its place, slipping into dress as metaphor for “the inferiority that flows towards the exterior” (Gurmendez). In Jana Sterbak, the dress becomes a denuding which renders visible the occult forces of the self, all that is spiritual, emotive and passionate.

Klossowski, in The Laws of Hospitality, speaks of the transitiveness of the body, of how the essence of eroticism consists in being hospitable, in being capable of putting on or inhabiting other bodies as if they were one’s own. Jana Sterbak accentuates in her work this dimension of the dress as body; the transit between the body and what covers it is a transubstantiation. Accordingly, a work such as Hairshirt becomes an anxiety-laden signifier of the finality of desire and Jacket condenses its antithesis: the impossibility of escaping from the self.

Jana Sterbak’s dresses are “bodies without organs” (Deleuze-Guattari), they are “fields of the immanence of desire”, they are alive, but only intensities circulate through them; only the convulsions of love, of the fear of death, of frustration; only the flaring up of beauty, of inspiration, of pain and desperation….

Vanitas. Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic alludes to the intensity of the temporalities of the human being, whose first and last horizon is death. The making explicit of this ephemeral character, relative as it is to exhaustion and wearing out, is combined with a mordant critique of the forms that the body is obliged to adopt in a culture whose anxiety is to convert it into the paradigm of eternal youth.

Vanitas destroys the taboo which prohibits us from seeing ourselves and from being seen as we really are: animal flesh. And in revealing the inertia of this flesh, which will rot and decompose, it summons up the repugnant and sinister nature of the terrible death sentence hanging over us. This mise en scene is no doubt liberating, but it is also obscene —to the extent that it transgresses the prohibition against making visible certain contents—, irrational and indecent — in that it denies the process of civilization, and carries us back to our constitutive animality-.

Sterbak establishes disquieting connections between the representable and the unrepresentable, at the same time as she questions the evidence of certain notions relative to the body, in her desire to posit anew the form in which we inhabit our identities, and with the intention of expanding the possibilities for experience which enable the subject to construct itself through others, knowing that the encounter is more important than the identity of the person encountered.

In her aesthetic investigations, Jana Sterbak eludes the idea of style, projecting herself in the heterogeneity of multiple materials and shifting through a diversity of creative processes and formulas, always according pre-eminence to the idea over the form and seeking to discover and stimulate the secret correspondences that exist between the materials and their spiritual connotations. In this way she creates new languages which are inscribed in the first beginnings of a new history of subjectivity, in which woman proclaims the revolutionary power of her visions and her energies, contributing to the renewal of the sense of her condition —as a person and as an artist— and can situate herself in the wider context of reflection on the human condition.

In the piece Corona Laurea (Noli me tangere), inspiration and madness are associated as extreme forms of mental energy, in an ironic reflection on the disturbing
ambivalence of the powers of the creative artist. It is, however, in the performance Artist as combustible that we find the most fascinating interpretation of the rapture that shakes and inflames the artist. In this performance, Jana Sterbak stands naked in a darkened room with a small heap of gunpowder on top of her head, sending out of herself an intense tongue of flame which lasts for only a few seconds and alludes to the transitory nature of the inspiration that illumines poetic visions.

To the extent that it makes possible the emergence of the darkest fluids that give life and sense to human matter, her vigorous, disquieting and subversive art has something “demonic” in it, something damned, which takes pleasure in destroying in order to create; something diabolical that causes the most recondite intensities to come to the surface and touches the very frontiers of madness; something incommunicable and unrepresentable, for all that it communicates and is represented; something that occupies a place beyond Good and Evil.

Rosa Martinez

La entrada Jana Sterbak, Sala Montcada, La Caixa Foundation, Barcelona, Spain, 1992 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.