Artium Museoa, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the exhibition Patricia Dauder. Unform (A1 Gallery, until 29 September 2024). The exhibition brings together sculptures, drawings, installations and films that, as a whole, explore the artist’s interest in tracking affective moments that often leave almost imperceptible traces, demonstrating her focus on the passage of time through the use of techniques such as accumulation and erasure. In this way, often using found objects, Dauder’s works evoke the potential stories enclosed in objects and spaces of which only tracks and traces remain. Unform is curated by Catalina Lozano, and Artium Museoa has produced a publication with an original text by historian and exhibition curator Juan de Nieves.

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Unform presents works by Patricia Dauder (Barcelona, 1973) produced mostly in the last ten years. Equally relevant in her practice are the protocols she activates when it comes to constructing her pieces: subjecting them to a variety of temperatures and humidity conditions, allowing light to shine on them, enabling oxidation processes that alter their surfaces, cutting, stripping or piercing them, baking and burning materials or keeping them buried for specific periods of time.

Through this approach, Dauder strains the limits of the materials employed in the works (papers, fabrics, clays, waxes, plasters...), which in turn refers to the techniques of an archaeologist and the restoration processes of the effects caused by atmospheric conditions and the passing of time. As Juan de Nieves explains in the text produced for this exhibition, “the artist establishes times and mechanics, watching over, rectifying – in short – undergoing a slow, unpredictable ritual. [...] we know that behind each work there is a previous invisible yet active biological life.”

Hers is a reflection that explores the experience of time, perception, representation and memory, issues that are also crucial in the construction of her films, audiovisual documents that require an active stance from the viewer. Unform includes the films Insulana (2021), based on a volcanic eruption recorded in the Azores between 1957 and 1958, and March 5th 1979 (2011), which refers to a luminous phenomenon that was recorded in the skies over the Canary Islands on 5 March 1979.

Taken together, as de Nieves indicates, “Patricia Dauder’s artistic practice and way of thinking about the world” give rise to “an organic, cohesive body of work [...] that could be described as ‘a landscape’.” This landscape, de Nieves suggests, is “not associated with a geographical territory, but with an entity organised from ideas and things. The narrative that is shown to us in Unform is therefore intersected by micro-narratives that tell us a great deal about our critical capacities and our will to imagine other possible worlds, or to launch ourselves into the practice of a radical imagination.”

Press note (pdf)