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.

Artists: Elssie Ansareo, Ibon Aranberri, Manu Arregui, Clemente Bernad, Abigail Lazkoz, Maider López, Asier Mendizabal, Itziar Okariz, Aitor Ortiz, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Sergio Prego, and Ixone Sádaba

For information:
Communication Department
Guggenheim Bilbao Museum
e mail: media@guggenheim-bilbao.es
telf: +34 94 435 90 91
fax: +34 94 435 90 59

GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM BILBAO
Abandoibarra Et. 2, 48001 Bilbao, Spain

Museum information desk: (+34) 94 435 90 80
Information: informacion@guggenheim-bilbao.es
Opening hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Chacun à son gout presents a selection of contemporary Basque artists who have all produced new projects in an exhibition specially conceived for the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum’s tenth anniversary.
Taken from Diderot, the title of the exhibition champions individual taste and freedom of choice. As a phenomenon relative toperception and time, taste may evolve according to social and individual preferences, and is influenced by class, gender, geopolitics, and aesthetic education.
Every new artwork, every new exercise in interpretation contributes new perspectives to the public’s reservoir of tastes and values. The twelve selected artists are part of a generation established in the late nineties using international art languages to respond to the complexities of their local milieu.

Elssie Ansareo’s La Danse des Flâneuses is a large photographic mural that dramatizes identity and otherness, situating familiar imagery alongside a gallery of phantasmagorical characters. This timeless genealogy subverts social hierarchies of origin and status.

Horizons is a series of bright pennants by Ibon Aranberri that zigzag from the roof of the museum, recycling and modifying Chillida’s graphic and sculptural legacy. In an ironic linguistic operation, cultural and political icons and anagrams are reconfigured to playfully demystify symbolism and memory.

In his latest film, Disarmingly Cute Manu Arregui explores the physical and psychological transformation of Vanesa Jiménez, known as “the glass girl” due to a degenerative illness, to question the concept of hyper-reality and the ethics of TV reporting.

Clemente Bernad uses photography as a social document in series that are either commissioned by newspapers or the result of his own inspiration, such as Day Laborers, Basque Chronicles, and Open Tombs a report on extreme left-wing Turkish prisoners.

Abigail Lazkoz’s black-and-white drawings double as a kind of restrained, synthetic writing in 130,000 Years of Last Tendencies, a large mural work that alludes to the art industry’s obsession with fashion and novelty, while recalling burial rites as a form of anthropological culture.

Maider López returns to the concept of spatial geometry to work an ironic, chameleonic transformation on one of the museum’s more classically designed galleries. By turning it into a “Frank Gehry gallery”, the artist borrows the architect’s signature style to question notions of authorship.

In Nom de guerre, Asier Mendizabal takes an apparent ready-made from an incident of street violence: a can that burns away on a concrete block like an urban joss-stick holder. In the limpid context of the museum building, the flames act as a sign of social angst, questioning both notions of control and the commemorative function of sculpture.

Sentences like Have You Given in to Your Desire to Master? are inscribed on placards by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa to signify social urges and political violence. Some of them are to be found in Project Turned into Installation, fixed to a sports hurdle.

With Irrintzi, an action shot on video, Itziar Okariz moves around the museum emitting irrintzis, an ancestral Basque shout. This tour in sound apprehends the space semantically in a play of contrasts between remote signifiers, such as the traditional connotations of the irrintzi and the spectacular modernity of the Guggenheim Bilbao.

Aitor Ortiz’s Y combines a series of photographic panels with a real opening in one wall of the museum. The work explores our phenomenological perception of architecture and the lines between reality, sculpture and photographic representation.

The concept of sculpture as intervention rather than merely object has led Sergio Prego to install Sequence of Dihedrals in the courtain walls of the museum Atrium. Although the title appears to be a simple allusion to geometrical abstraction, the work is in fact a conceptual challenge to the actual function of art in a museum.

Ixone Sádaba explores issues of identity by splitting her own image, organizing theatrical dance routines in sublime, apocalyptic landscapes. Poétique de la disparition and Leviathan are two photo series in which intimate or atmospheric turbulence becomes a metaphor for a tragic, contemporary dysfunction.

La entrada Chacun À Son Gout, Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, 2007-2008 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.