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Artium Museoa, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the exhibition Ibon Aranberri. Entresaka (A3 Gallery, until 29 September 2024). The exhibition brings together a selection of works that begins in the 1990s and continues to the present. The exhibition is part of a co-production project with the Reina Sofía National Museum and Art Centre (MNCARS), where a first exhibition dedicated to the artist’s production was held under the title Vista parcial (Partial View). The project concludes with this new presentation at Artium Museoa under the name Entresaka, in collaboration with Dinamoa Sormen Gunea. Both exhibitions have been curated by Manuel Borja Villel and Beatriz Herráez.
As was the case in Vista parcial, the main core of Entresaka is made up of Aranberri’s representative works, which reveal his concern for the formation processes of landscape and how human intervention transforms it. His practice is therefore embedded in a veiled web of references and gestures, constituted by sideways glances towards the remains and contours of a whole that evades complete definition.
In this sense, many of the works on display explore the idea of landscape as a construct of modernity, which leads to the development of large macro-projects. The artist’s other concerns can be sensed at various points in the exhibition, as he revisits the material and conceptual legacy of early industrialisation and its traces.
Deliberately avoiding the static nature of retrospection, the artist juxtaposes strategies of repetition and fragmentation in his projects, deploying rehearsals for an open work that mutates according to varying contexts and perspectives. This is the case of Entresaka, in which Aranberri’s works are not limited to a defined exhibition space, but are rather integrated into various rooms throughout the museum, including those dedicated to the presentation of the collection that contains his work. The areas that lead to the main gallery space or the space dedicated to conserving the museum’s archives are also places where works by the artist are on display.
The museum’s A3 Gallery houses works such as Organigrama (Organogramme) (2010), a structure system developed as an element of mediation for the exhibition dedicated to Aranberri by the Fundació Tàpies in 2011, which will be shown at Entresaka as a work in its own right; Makina eskua da (2016), an installation created for the Tratado de paz (Peace Treaty) exhibition as part of the San Sebastian European Capital of Culture programme that the artist transferred to the Arms Industry Museum in Eibar; or Itzal marra (2019), a work composed of several intaglio engravings made using the frottage technique on tombstones from the collection of the San Telmo Museoa.
Política hidraúlica (Water Policy) (2004-2010) is a photographic installation that brings together nearly a hundred images of dams and reservoirs scattered across the Iberian Peninsula. In Entresaka, Aranberri returns to his first formulation, presented at Artium Museoa in 2005 as part of the Gure Artea Awards, occupying a space in the archive area of the museum’s Documentation Centre.
The exhibition also includes works installed in the context of the current presentation of the museum’s collection (Bilduma Hau Colección. Elementary Movements 1950-2000). This is the case of Gaur egun (This is CNN) (2002), a version of the sculpture Izaro by the artist Néstor Basterretxea, better known as the symbol presiding over the Chamber of the Basque Parliament, which Aranberri made for his exhibition at the Trayecto Gallery in Vitoria-Gasteiz in 2002. Artium Museoa’s A0 Gallery also contains interventions by the artist on project models related to the remains of the unfinished Lemóniz nuclear power plant: Atlántida. Science Museum Project for the Lemóniz Nuclear Power Plant (2001-2002) by Néstor Basterretxea, and the Conversion Project of the Lemóniz Nuclear Power Plant and Affected Lands into a Space for Public Use, developed as a final-year project in 1998 by the architect Carmen Abad.