Category Archives: 2009

Adult Contemporary is the first individual exhibition of Carles Congost in Barcelona since 2005.

 

Adult Contemporary consists of a collection of recent work that combines different supports such as photography, object, drawings and music with the intention of placing a series of reflexions about human relationships on the scene, that include references to family, social background and our intimate beliefs. To realize some of the new proposals, the artist uses the romantic photo-novel format, reaffirming his interest for narrative aspects in the use of images. In these works, presented as large scale magazine or comic-book pages, the artist claims the validity of the format that becomes a tool with enormous plastic and expressive potential.

 

Carles Congost (Olot, Girona, 1970) lives and works in Barcelona. His work has been shown in multiple exhibitions, such as Say I’m your number one in the MUSAC in Leon (2007), Memorias de Arkaran in the CAC in Malaga (2006), Un mystique determinado in the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela (2005), That’s my impresión! in the CAAC of Seville (2002), Popcorn Love in the MNCARS in Madrid (2001) or Country Girls in the Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona (2000). He has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions in the Mücsarnok Kunsthalle of Budapest, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt of Berlin, the Centre Pompidou of Paris, the MIGROS in Zurich, the MAMBA of Buenos Aires, the Palais Tokyo of Paris, the PS1 Contemporary Art Center of New York or the Museum für Gegenwart in Berlin. Currently he participates in Yo Uso Perfume Para Ocupar Más Espacio, an exhibition in the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, México DF.

Aleksandra Mir presents a series of collages that combine religious iconography with that of space travel. “If angels and astronauts share the same sky”, she asks, “Isn’t it time they were introduced?”

 

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Infinite space within an infinite nothingness. Undefinable spirit within unlimited thought. Icons and insaciable quests. Human curiosity has a need for a context within which to exist. Religion was science as science is now religion. The justification of our lust and thrust for the infinite, away from our sensory paradise, comparable to the search for the deepest recesses of our minds, are both ways of seeking the answers to creation, purpose and demise. Religion, as a system of control, has come close to its great rival throughout history – the laws of physics that govern our universe. ‘When will miracles cease?’ – The modes of technology that we produce are ingenious to the children of earth but woefully inadequate adaptations of our unlimited imagination. ‘Why are we here?’ – Spiritual answers are equally unsatisfactory compared to the power of such simple questions. The answer may lie in convergence. Technology may have to wait for the power of the human brain to fully develop its (super)natural abilities. Will the technologies that are then produced be miraculous in that they may not require material substance to work but a faith, a belief in laws of physics to subtle than matter itself cannot withstand their logic? Will they be based in technology so discreet that it will be indistinguishable from the very fabric of the universe and all that is created within it? When we look at science and religion, are we looking at the same technology at different levels of evolution? Is humankind always to be polarised and thus paralysed?

 

Mark Baker

 

 

Aleksandra Mir was born in Lubin, Poland, in 1967. She has been showing on international exhibitions, among many others, at 53th Biennale of Venezia; as well as in Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Kunsthaus Zurich, Institute of Contemporary Art London, SMAK Ghent, PS1/MOMA New York, Whitney Biennial New York.

The exhibition “the long gaze the short gaze” is a look around the political space and the limits of subjectivity. Through three video projections and a series of photographs Åsdam analyzes of the relationship of the person and the environment, linking this issue with issues of disagreement.

 

Four categories are essential to Åsdam’s work; Speech, Living, Sexualities and Struggle. Speech is often theatrical and poetically displaced in Åsdam’s film, video and audio works, and point out how subjectivity is formed through speech acts — either through actual speech or through other forms of self-articulation like clothing, gestures and routines. Many of his works express an interest for the performative aspects of speech and for how meaning is temporarily stabilized through repetition, inscription and reinscription. The category of Living is descriptive of the integration of architecture, place and social dynamics, for instance how a park functions within a city, or, how our everyday lives are conditioned by rapid economic and political changes. The works also display a strong interest for the interplay of fantasy and narration in everyday experience of the environment. Sexualities refers to the plurality of sexual and gendered experience, fundamental for Åsdam`s construction of characters. His work witnesses a sensitivity to the instability of the self that expands on the merits of queer theory and feminism, and simultaneously invites the viewers own desires and presuppositions in the building of narrative and desire. Struggle is vital, not only in a political sense, but also as a way of understanding the contestation and affirmation of ‘speech’ (subject formation), ‘living’ (the meaning of the everyday) and ‘sexualities’ (the meaning of our bodies) in our everyday, involving both psychological and social processes.

 

Knut Åsdam was born in Trondheim, Norway in 1968 and he lives and works in Oslo. He has been showing on the international art scene for the last ten years. He represented Norway in the 50 Venice Biennale, participated in the 8 Istanbul Biennale, the 1st Melbourne International Biennale and in Manifesta 7, Italy. He has shown, among many others, at Tate Britain, the Kunsthalle Bern, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, the Moderna Museet, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the MOMA/PS1, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and in FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon. Articles related to his work have been published in Artforum, Grey Room, Le Monde Diplomatique, Untitled Magazine, amongst others.

 

Upcoming projects and exhibitions 2009

Walter & Mc Bean Galleries, San Francisco Art Institute, USA

Tate Modern, UK

Galeria Joan Prats presents the exhibition “1992 – 2008” by Albert Rafols Casamada, with a selection of works that bear witness to the constant activity of this painter in the last 16 years and to put as one of the most representative painters of Spanish contemporary art with his genuine and poetic way of abstraction.

 

 

Through his carrer, Ràfols Casamada has been recognized with the Premio Nacional de las Artes Plásticas del Ministerio de Cultura de España, in 1980, and the Premi Nacional d’Arts Visuals de la Generalitat de Catalunya, en 2003, among other awards. Also MACBA in 2001 organized an extensive retrospective of his work.

The exhibition “Serie Calculum, Calculum Series” is an essay about the concentration, the density and the creation of value in contemporary society through a group of objects and a series of maps and diagrams.

 

It’s a collection of elements of small format that as trace, point out and condense a social, political or economic problem and at the same time they present themselves as knots in a net or circuit that reveal a system or mechanism of construction on the concept of idea or ‘’value’’.

 

This project is related with the ‘’wunderkammern’’ or cabinet of wonders, where particular findings, artistic works, scientific discoveries were received under a unique category: that one of the wonder and surprise.

 

These collections were at a time group of objects and their systematization. It was the evidence and the micro-checking of the theories about the functioning of the world that were generated.

 

How is it that an object acquires a special value facing another and this value modifies other objects? How can this value imply a speculation and an added value, this manoeuvre to be the meaning and the object it’s significant? How is it that the production builds this value and that the transport of objects and their reintegration modify this categorization of objects? How can a collection be systematized and how are collections of objects formed? How do we select things of the world?

 

‘’Calculus’’ is translated as stone in latin and a ‘’calculum’’ is interpreted as a stone in a shoe. The calculations are speculations or projections according to a tendency but at the same time an intersection of forces and epistemological sedimentation. In such way the exhibition presents a display of drawings, photographs, maps, objects, newspaper bits as small problems that were found by chance in travelling through different places like Brazil, Korea, China, Mexico, Colombia and Spain and are evidences of problems of categories or value in each context and at the same time entries to a much more complex definition of what is selection and concentration.

 

During his artistic trajectory, Biennale of Sao Paulo, Biennale of Lyon, Site Santa Fe, amongst others, he has distinguished himself for using unorthodox formats such as the multiple, the ‘piece-book’ and experiments that try to link public art with graphic languages.

 

In his work he analyzes and dissects the powers that communicate the different graphic means in their distribution of information, and also of attitudes and values.