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.

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.

Curator: Rosa Martínez 
Andratx Cultural Centre. Mallorca. Spain. March-August 2002

Selected Artists: Ana Laura Aláez (Bilbao, 1964), Pilar Albarracín (Sevilla, 1968), Helena Almeida (Lisboa, 1934), Vasco Araújo ( Lisboa, 1975), Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, 1957), Cristina García Rodero (Puertollano, 1949), Ferran García Sevilla (Palma de Mallorca, 1949), Susy Gómez (Pollença, 1964), Rogelio López Cuenca (Nerja,1959), Juan Muñoz (Madrid, 1953-2001), Santiago Sierra (Madrid, 1966), Néstor Torrens (Tenerife, 1954), Eulàlia Valldosera (Vilafranca del Penedès, 1963), Joana Vasconcellos (París, 1971)

Mallorca, like many other islands in the Mediterranean, was once a land of pirates, and the myth of the South and the sun have made it a seasonal paradise. This, together with the fact that artists from the Iberian periphery need enormous determination to survive in an extraordinarily competitive international context, led me to choose the title The Song of the Pirate for the exhibition currently on view at the Centro Cultural Andratx.

Ever since the age of the Romantics the figure of the pirate has been surrounded by an aura of bravery, strength and daring. The pirate breathes the spirit of freedom, braves open horizons and is driven by a boundless ambition. The sea is his home; risk, his way of life. As the song goes, he loves danger, and finds his balance in the storm…. This idealized image highlights the pirates homelessness and lawlessness, but it omits the violence of the economic interest that motivated his travels. In Andratx the story goes that in 1396 pirates carried off everything, including the hosts from the village church… Pirates usually worked on their own, whereas corsairs adopting the same strategies tended to be mercenaries at the service of the geopolitical or imperial interests of governments.

It is also to Romanticism that we owe the vision of the artist as a tormented genius, a creature apart, a bohemian warrior chasing the ideal of a constantly renewed creation. And it is true that it is the artists task to create worlds, combat stereotypes, reinvent languages, hunger for the infinite. As Rafael Alberti once said, the true artist is a pirate whose aim is to steal the dawn from the skies. Nowadays, romanticizing the artist, or the pirate, may seem rather kitsch. And yet the idea still fires our imagination and, as a symbol of freedom, comforts those who find no refuge in the existing order of things.

The 14 artists exhibited here are not pirates, and yet they have some of the pirates heroic qualities. Ana Laura Aláez, Pilar Albarracín, Helena Almeida, Vasco Araújo, Miquel Barceló, Cristina García Rodero, Ferran García Sevilla, Susy Gómez, Rogelio López Cuenca, Juan Muñoz, Santiago Sierra, Néstor Torrens, Eulàlia Valldosera and Joana Vasconcelos come from different regions of Spain and Portugal, and for me they are extraordinary examples of critical rigor, passion, fantasy, and the ability to sail the stormy seas of contemporary artistic production. Some, such as Miquel Barceló, Juan Muñoz or García Sevilla, are already internationally acclaimed. Women such as Helena Almeida and Cristina García Rodero have only recently won the recognition that their constancy, their bravery and their poetics deserve. And the youngest members of the group demonstrate the most promising visions and directions in art at the beginning of the 21st century.

It is only through critical reflection that we can hope to discover from what ideological substrate our practices spring, what vacuums we seek to fill with our unbridled consumption of images, messages and places, and what function art fulfils in this whirlwind. Art is passion and thought, but also production. Production and consumption, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas says, generate material and intellectual wealth. Yet the reigning liberalism demands rapid consumption without resistance… That is why we need artists: to open up the significant moment and critically interpret the times we live in.

In contexts such as those of Spain and Portugal, institutional support for the more daring contemporary artistic practices is not as sustained as it should be, and often many of our most significant creative talents have had to emigrate. It is cause for celebration, therefore, that the promoters of the Centro Cultural Andratx – Jacob and Patricia Asbaek – should have taken on the risk of creating this new cultural facility and decided to open its doors to some of the most noteworthy exponents of the contemporary art of Portugal and Spain.

In their work these 14 artists insinuate questions into our minds and lure us away from dreary routine with the promise of adventure and hidden treasures.

Rosa Martínez

La entrada The Song of the Pirate, Andratx Cultural Centre, Mallorca, Spain, 2002 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

Curator: Rosa Martínez 
Roman Theater Sagunto, Sagunto, Spain, 1998

Selected Artists: Ghada Amer, Teresa Cebrián, Victoria Civera, Ayse Erkmen, Irit Hemmo, Gülsün Karamustafa, Jenny Marketou, Carmen Navarrete, Shirin Neshat, Eulália Valldosera, María Zárraga

‘The Mediterranean has a tragic solar sense which is different from that of fog. On certain evenings in the sea or at the foot of mountains, night falls over the perfect curve of a small bay and an anxious plenitude then rises from the silent waters. In such places one can see how, if the Greeks felt despair, it always arose through beauty and through the oppressiveness inherent in beauty It is in the midst of that golden misfortune that tragedy reaches its climax. In contrast, the despair of our times feeds on ugliness and convulsions. For this reason, Europe would be wretched, if pain could ever be so.’
ALBERT CAMUS, The Exile of Helen.

In seamen’s parlance, mar de fondo (‘grounds-well’) refers to the deep rumblings of the ocean, caused by storms at sea, that reach the coast, where the clear skies may belie the rough sea. A grounds-well contains hidden tremors and carries to the coast echoes of battles and the thrust of whirlpools originating in its deepest abysses.
In art terminology, a painting with mar de fondo (‘a seascape background’) has figures
set against undulating blue surfaces. Seascapes call to mind distances conducive to
daydreaming, arousing a thirst for travel, a sense of the infinite, a yearning for other possible worlds, recollections of disasters or Utopias of well-being.
With its powerful evocative force, the sea provides one of the most fascinating images,
and one of those most often used in poetry The sea is a metaphor for freedom. It is also the cradle of the gods, the dwelling-place of monsters, a repository of mystery and a symbol of the tempestuous darkness of the unconscious. It is also the garbage tip for the uncontrolled dumping of industrial waste, a source of riches exploited indiscriminately, an unpredictable immensity where accidents happen, battles are won or lost (whether commercial, political or amorous) and the resting place of sunken treasure.
In terms of symbolic density the Mediterranean has a special place among the oceans.
Its mythologies are studded with wonders and tragedies, On its coastlines, the Greek
philosophers intuited some of the most accurate accounts of the origins and meaning of the world. Three continents converge on its waters, where different languages and religions coexist, and traditions and fanaticisms mingle. Moreover, its climate, habitability and dimensions form a congenial nature related to its geographical features.
The Mediterranean is one of the determining factors in this meeting of eleven artists at
the exhibition Mar de fondo. This title refers to the psycho-geography in which these women were born who, driven by various winds and immense yearnings, have flown to other latitudes, seen other places and are now rethinking their past and their present, viewed through eyes charged with wisdom, their voices modulated by both experience and the energy which creates the need to say something new. Well aware of their twofold peripheral status -as women and Mediterraneans- these artists, with their doubts, their wavering, and yet with unflinching self-assurance, are exploring the new becomings of the world and, through art, contributing to the emergence of new realities.
They are not the only ones who feel frustrated and jaded by a self-seeking art, closed in on itself, exclusive and excluding, essentially formalistic and supposedly universal. There is increasingly greater political awareness that culture is generated in the social sphere and that it affects the most recondite aspects of the individual. We now know that the personal is profoundly political – even our sexual identity is the result of models imposed by dominant ideologies.
Criticism of modernist dogmas, post-colonial reflection and the struggle of marginalised groups -homosexuals, feminists, immigrants and so on- have engendered an unshakeable desire to do away with hierarchies in the arts, to permeate museum walls and bring art into the social arena, and to give credence to peripheral voices as harbingers of discourses that undermine the absolutist pretensions of the West’s hegemonic vision. That is why new artistic proposals flourish in their deconstruction and reinterpretation of history, in guestioning the powers that set up a sexual division between the public and private spheres, in studying the relationship between the human body and architecture, or in the analysis of the meaning of monuments in an urban context, in order to punctuate the message to be deciphered that is the street. In the struggle for an egalitarian space and in upholding alternative modes of thought, the world is today waging many battles that are reshaping living contexts.
For women, performing in the public arena is hazardous in that it involves the lack of
confidence associated with one unversed in something. They are nevertheless stimulated by the challenge of imbuing their place of performance with new meaning and of conguering new modes of expression. They are thereby also defying the ‘Law of the Father’, which has traditionally excluded them from the language and therefore the power to operate on models of symbolic representation.
From an awareness that ‘the politics of space is always sexual’, as Beatriz Colomina puts it, the proposals staged in the vicinity of the Roman theatre at Sagunto are enormously valuable. The artists have accepted the difficulties entailed by working in the open air, without the protection afforded by the closed space of a gallery or ‘their own room’. They have explored new political and creative possibilities by offering their proposals in a place which agglutinates both the long historical memory of its Roman theatre and the controversy surrounding restoration work on the monument and its aesthetic mismatch with the town as a whole.
Ayse Erkmen‘s idea of using different models to create brash hairstyles becomes bitingly critical of the monument concept. The latter, apart from being transposed to woman through the male-chauvinist discourse, particularly when it involves sculptural forms, is a stage metaphor for the power to acquire prominence in the urban fabric by creating protruding volumes which become signs punctuating space and dominating the meaning of places.

Her images, printed on handbills, have been handed out at hairdressing salons in Sagunto. Her installation in spaces associated with everyday use arouses reflection on the artifice and construction of beauty, as well as on the body’s capacity for playfulness and invention in relation to the urban context and sexual projections.
Irit Hemmo‘s performance in the streets of Sagunto -carrying a sculpture of a castrated
heifer- could be interpreted as a critical reconstruction of religious processions, as parodying worship of the Golden Calf, and as an appraisal of the power of the street as an arena for flaunting cultural symbols and sexual experiences. This performance, previously staged in Tel Aviv and Istanbul, acquires new connotations in Spain, where the bull is regarded as a symbol of virility and heifers are chased through the streets at popular festivals.
Inspired by the philosophy of situationist drifts, Jenny Marketou has also taken the street as a setting for constructing memory and for random encounters which orientate people’s lives. After interviewing citizens of Puerto de Sagunto, Jenny pieces together a plan of the town using fragments of their recollections, punctuated not by the street layout but by recall of its aromas and the customs of its people. She thereby connects up the pulse of past and present, and builds up a poetics of flux and of the town’s ‘invisible climates’. The resulting map is thus defined by the intensity of experiences and the dynamics of memory. Her frontiers are flexible and act as time frames that can be redefined according to her interviewees’ varying perceptions or recollections. The street vendor’s cart she installs with some of the items associated with those recollections becomes a fleeting, nomadic monument standing in stark contrast to the gandiloquent Roman theatre.
For Vicky Civera, who was born in Sagunto itself, being able to install her sculptures in
the theatre precinct is a way of coming to grips with her origins and reflecting on the limits of representation. By installing a transparent mould of her head on a platform coated with lawn placed in an old cistern, she relates body to place, and alludes to the prospects generated by return and reencounter. Her ‘Red Guardian’, set in a large shrine niche at the entrance to the stage, becomes a metaphor for a type of surveillance far removed from the authoritarian severity of traditional guards. The reeds shaping his body which let the air pass through, and the velvet also used in the figure, stand for flexibility and delicateness, while three figures with a bronze base allude to a firmness which is neither compact nor turned in on itself.
Ghada Amer’s floral offering, set on one of the theatre terraces, re-creates the abstract strips of a composition reminiscent of Frank Stella’s early paintings, Here, her yardstick is the rigidity of the paradigms in Western art. However, she uses plants and their organic growth -which excludes them from patterns of linear geometry- to explore the tension involved in submitting to a civilising order which imposes standards of beauty and many lines of repression. Her use of cacti, with their well-known phallic connotations, and flowers, likewise understood as a sexual metaphor, reminds us that both sexes are victims of the imposition of the dominant models of thought.

From one of the side vaults of the theatre, Teresa Cebrian has suspended four cages
containing the four elements: air, fire, water and earth. While fragments of the last three are trapped inside the cages, the more ethereal air is that of Sagunto itself. Harkings ofpre- Socratic philosophy are here combined with allusions to mediaeval torture and prisons, prompting reflection on a host of existential spheres. From ecological disasters to the loss of our poetic capacity for relating to the primaeval, the delicateness of these four elements of the universe has been used to rekindle nostalgia for freedom without coercion.
Dependence between the sexes and the difficulties women encounter when attempting to forge their own future are approached by Maria Zarraga in her disturbing photographic projections. Her use of plasticine for shoes or as a second skin which peels off from one’s body alludes to pain and the need to break free of imposed habits, as well as to the frailty of the props we use to bolster our identity The images she shows at Sagunto feature a woman whose body is totally enveloped in and hidden by her long tresses, which become waves of sensuality. They also draw attention to the inordinacy of feminine hysteria, and to a desire to disclose one’s true self, free of imposed symbols.
Gulsun Karamustafa explores the Mediterranean as a sea supporting the coexistence of a multitude of sexes. She links the transvestite passion for signs with the decoration on balconies, architectural elements which open onto both the exterior and interior and
connect the public and private spheres, the visible and the invisible. In the context of the sexual use of signs, the figure of the transvestite epitomises a desire to transform oneself, be it merely to become an icon, an essence -the ‘female essence’- or the stereotype triumphant. The transvestite becomes a spectacle, as evinced in pop videos of Freddie Mercury or Bulent Ersoy one of Istanbul’s most fascinating transexual. In his videogram, I Want to Break Free, Mercury appears dressed as a housewife, having succumbed to domestic chores as a token of love. Bulent Ersoy in one of his latest videos, assumes the role of a mother, taking the desire to be a ‘woman’ to the extreme of overcoming the fixation on the inordinacy of sexual attributes.
In her analysis of the division of power on the basis of gender, Carmen Navarretereflects on ways of murdering a woman, whether in history, in tragedy or in a present-day context. Regarded as man’s property woman deserves punishment if she disobeys patriarchal designs. The idea of murdering her ranges from literal killing to the symbolic: her death can be achieved not only with the use of a knife, poison or weapons, but by excluding her from discourse, curtailing her power and submitting her to a phallocentnc order which imposes just one model of sexual pleasure. Disciplinary orders that annul femininity are part of a patriarchal, totalitarian ideology that admits only submissive, docile women and induces hysteria as a badly channelled form of rebellion.
The alienation of women and their submission to dominant religious and cultural systems in Islamic societies is examined by Shirin Neshat. Women become guardians of a revolution which dictates that their body must remain concealed under a chador, which they may only let go of to pick up a firearm. In Iran, the use of the veil is associated with urban culture, while in rural areas and in situations in which a woman’s hands are required for work, they do not cover their body completely. In a videogram entitled Anchorage, Shirin shows only the naked face, hands and feet of a woman, while the rest of her body vanishes into the darkness. The gestures of praying, shooting and dancing to Sufi music reveal how religion, military power and Sufi philosophy take hold of a woman’s body and shape her movements.
The ways in which disease, sex, love and loss shape our psychosomatic identity are painstakingly reconstructed in the work ofEulalia Valldosera. She makes use of new technologies to produce installations in which various objects, spotlights and photographic or video projections are arranged so as to create a ghoulish atmosphere. Emotions from her childhood, or the pain associated with disease and physical or psychological imbalance, are relived in the spaces where the artist presents her work. For her Sagunto project, Eulalia Valldosera re-created the projections she had presented at Munster in 1997, in which a woman’s shadow leaps between two light-filled areas. For health reasons, the artist will not be able to display her project, but her work still advocates a need to venture into the archetypes of the unconscious, singling her out as one of the most sensitive explorers of the
darknesses we are peopled by The echoes of ideological and existential unrest emanating from the work of all these artists are related to currents of transformation emerging from the social sphere, with their spin-offs in philosophy and science. Mathematical precision, in a Euclidean view of the world, which describes movement as joining points in space, and the clear correlation between weight and distance in Newton’s laws of gravity are now being questioned by the relativity of the so-called ‘nomadic sciences’, including meteorology and fluid mechanics, particularly with regard to the movements of the sea. The forces of matter do not describe prefectly predictable, linear movements in Cartesian space. They generate turbulence, spiral motion and movements that cannot easily be encompassed by geometrical models.
In similar fashion, with unpredictable movements, all these women have approached their development and sought their place in the discourse of art and other social fields. Like winged Nikes, they poise to capture the fleeting moment. In their guise as Greek winged victories, they are better placed to interpret the disarray we live in and create flexible models for new existential fields. In this respect, the groundswell is a metaphor for the new conceptual, existential and aesthetic storms and shifts to come, prompted by the entry of women into the art scene and other social spheres. In these new spheres, art cannot be geared solely to a search for beauty Hence, Helen ceases to be the passive object of Paris’ desire and the cause of strife between Greeks and Trojans. Instead, she becomes the symbol of a newfound beauty without paradigm or standards; a changing beauty engendered by the resoluteness and seeking of Helen herself.

Rosa Martínez.

La entrada Mar de Fondo ('Groundswell'), Roman Theater Sagunto, Sagunto, Spain, 1998 se publicó primero en Rosa Martínez - Independent Art Curator.

The Biennial had its permanent headquarters in Barcelona during odd-numbered years (1985, 1987, 1989, 1991), and became a nomadic event during even-numbered years when it was held in Thessalonika (1986), Bologna (1988) and Marseille (1990). Rosa Martínez was the director of the Barcelona Biennial from 1988 until 1991 and gave the event fresh impetus by opening it up to confrontation between northern European artists and circuits. Over 500 creators from the fields of architecture, the plastic arts, film and video, design, photography, cartoons and comics, literature, fashion, music, theatre and dance took part in the 1989 Biennial. In 1991 the Barcelona project was cancelled because the city’s municipal council was focused on organising the 1992 Olympic Games. This marked the end of one of the most singular events of its kind, both in terms of its commitment to multidisciplinarity and to boosting intercity cultural networks.

Architects such as David Chipperfield, writers such as Javier Cercas, photographers such as Erwin Olaff and visual artists such as Juan Urrios, Eulalia Valldosera, Richard Venlet, Cathy de Monchaux and Antoni Abad took part in the Barcelona Biennial.

La entrada Mediterranean Biennial, Barcelona, Spain, 1988-1992 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.