Rubio’s latest film, Clamor [Moan], explores the subject of death according to the burial sites of the “rejected”: suicides, reprisal victims, atheists... Edurne Rubio is a visual artist whose practice extends to performances, films, sound projects and public space interventions. The exhibition also includes archive images and texts connected to some of the sites appearing in the film.

La muestra permite examinar mediante series de trabajos de distintos momentos la producción del artista desde los años 80 hasta el presente. La muestra forma parte de un proyecto curatorial único que se despliega simultáneamente en el Museo Reina Sofía de Madrid y en Artium Museoa

El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del País Vasco, Artium Museoa, presenta la exposición Néstor Sanmiguel Diest. La peripecia del autómata (Sala A3, hasta el 1 de noviembre de 2022). La exposición presenta cerca de 80 obras, además de una amplia selección de dibujos de sus “cuadernos de trabajo”, que en conjunto ofrecen la oportunidad de examinar la producción del artista desde finales de la década de los 80 hasta el presente. La muestra forma parte de un proyecto curatorial único integrado por dos exposiciones distintas, la de Artium Museoa y la que se presentó el pasado 2 de junio en el Palacio de Velázquez del Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía de Madrid. Con ocasión de esta exposición, ambos museos preparan la edición de una publicación que contará con textos de Beatriz Herráez, comisaria del proyecto y Peio Aguirre, y recogerá una conversación entre Néstor Sanmiguel Diest y Ángel Calvo Ulloa.

La peripecia del autómata despliega series de trabajos ejecutadas en distintos momentos de la trayectoria de Néstor Sanmiguel Diest (Zaragoza, 1949) y dibuja un recorrido que permite adentrarse en la práctica de un autor que se define a sí mismo como un «artista de taller». Junto con piezas de colecciones privadas y del propio autor, la muestra integra cuatro pinturas de la Colección Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del País Vasco: En la penumbra de tu corazón (1994), Los sentimientos no expresados del lehendakari (2004), El arte de esquivar (2004) y La hija del capitán (2004).

Desde los primeros años de su actividad, vinculado a la fundación de colectivos artísticos como A Ua Crag, y el Segundo partido de la montaña, Sanmiguel Diest se presenta como un productor metódico y prolífico que idea de modo ininterrumpido sistemas, reglas y protocolos, que aplica en la construcción de sus piezas. Su obra ingente, principalmente dibujos y pinturas, conforma un catálogo singular en el que se confunden los límites entre imagen y texto, como en un palimpsesto que desvela y oculta al mismo tiempo una sucesión de relatos que interpelan al espectador.

La cronología de la exposición se inicia a finales de los ochenta, momento en el que el artista mantiene una doble ocupación, en su taller y empleado como patronista en una factoría textil, un lugar que no abandona plenamente hasta el año 2000. Del ejercicio de esta profesión derivan la aplicación de una lógica meticulosa y precisa en sus procesos de trabajo y los guiños y referencias persistentes al espacio de la fábrica y a una iconografía militante. Del mismo modo que en la industria, Sanmiguel Diest traslada la jornada laboral, de (al menos) ocho horas al día, a la ejecución de una producción sistematizada en su estudio. Una cadena de montaje transferida al taller del artista en la que es habitual el empleo de troqueles, patrones y matrices en el interior de sus piezas a modo de collages, mediante el frottage y la copia.

En distintas ocasiones, Sanmiguel Diest se ha referido a su práctica como el «oficio de esquivar», una premisa que se materializa en su forma de situarse en la periferia, no solo geográfica, sino también discursiva y material. Este rehuir o alejarse de las narrativas y los debates más extendidos, ha funcionado como táctica y método, generando un pensamiento y un corpus de trabajo que cuestiona y desafía los modos de producción contemporáneos y su organización del tiempo.

Alejado de cualquier convención, su trabajo se sitúa en un campo en el que son frecuentes las referencias a los ámbitos de la historia del arte, la literatura y la música, pero también a lo más cotidiano y ordinario, al incorporar en sus piezas documentos, facturas, fragmentos de textos, notas o páginas de prensa. Se trata de una invitación a pasear por una selva de símbolos, un lugar plagado de silencios expresivos, en una negociación constante con aquello que se agolpa en los márgenes y que, con frecuencia, pasa desapercibido. Una producción que no participa de una interpretación literal del mundo, y que se asienta en una simultaneidad de apropiaciones y citas, como un mecanismo potencialmente infinito y circular que sorprende por su densidad.

Néstor Sanmiguel Diest
El artista vive y trabaja en Aranda de Duero. En el año 1985 fundó en esta localidad, junto a los artistas Rufo Criado, Rafael Lamata o Jesús Max, entre otros, el colectivo de artistas A Ua Crag; también participó en la creación de los grupos Red District o el II Partido de la Montaña. En los 90 inicia una intensa trayectoria individual que inicialmente, hasta finales de esa década, compaginó con su trabajo como patronista en una fábrica textil. Su producción se sustenta en el desarrollo riguroso de complejas tramas visuales y narrativas, obras no exentas de ironía realizadas a partir de minuciosos trazados geométricos y combinaciones de módulos que se repiten de manera sistemática sobre las superficies de las telas y el papel.
Su obra se encuentra en las colecciones del MACBA, MNCARS, MUSAC y Artium Museoa, entre otras entidades, así como en numerosos fondos institucionales y privados. Ha celebrado exposiciones individuales en espacios como el Museo Reina Sofía, el MUSAC de León, Centro Cultural Montehermoso, Galería Maisterravalbuena de Madrid y Trayecto Galería en Vitoria-Gasteiz.

Néstor Sanmiguel Diest. La peripecia del autómata
Sala A3, desde el 24 de junio hasta el 1 de noviembre de 2022
La peripecia del autómata es un proyecto curatorial que se despliega en dos exposiciones simultáneas: una en Madrid, en la sede del Palacio de Velázquez del Museo Reina Sofía, y otra en Vitoria-Gasteiz, en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del País Vasco, Artium Museoa.

Documentos para descargar

Nota de prensa (pdf)  Lista de obra (pdf)  Solicitud de imágenes 

In Clamor, Edurne Rubio Barredo’s latest film, the artist depicts places that were used as burial sites for those relegated by the Catholic Church: suicides, babies who died before being baptised, executed people, atheists, passers-by and Protestants. By focusing on the specific history of the province of Burgos, Rubio has gathered together personal stories that are infused by the historical events and processes that have marked the region. The current state of these places reflects the coexistence of life and death and the cohabitation of various species within the territory, thereby questioning the monopoly over the sacred of certain institutions.

Edurne Rubio (1974) is a visual artist based in Brussels working in the fields of exhibitions, performance, film and architecture. Her research work has been associated with individual or collective perception of time and space. Her work is tied to documentary and anthropology, using interviews, archival images and research into oral communication.

Produced in collaboration with MONDRAGON 

Linked activity

Screening of Clamor followed by a discussion with Edurne Rubio
Friday July 22, 12 pm
Free entrance

Brochure

The Z Gallery is a space that explores new ways of associating film with art. It is neither a film season in a cinema nor a typical exhibition. It is a project that constructs a third space in the museum from which to visualise and analyse works by artists approaching the cinematographic field and filmmakers exploring the exhibition format. It is a programme that was created to think about the moving image in the museum, introducing authors seeking new narrative forms by questioning the conventions, genres and categorisations that have historically defined cinematographic language. 
Curator: Garbiñe Ortega

Empowering Acts: A Brief Reflection on Fluid Frontiers

Liberation is a hard thing to pin down. It is highly elusive. It often operates under the cover of darkness, sometimes only leaving a subtle trace of its existence – moving from one location to another through hushed tones and clandestine movements – evading surveillance at every turn, waiting for just the right moment when individual whispers are ripe enough to be transformed into a collective shout.

In Ephraim Asili’s Fluid Frontiers, the fifth and final film in his remarkable series entitled The Diaspora Suite – a project that saw Asili journey to Ethiopia, Brazil, Ghana, Jamaica and the United States in search of unifying markers of connection between African descendant people, poems take a back seat to the people who activate, process and reimagine them.

Asili documents Detroit/Windsor natives as they read passages aloud from books published by Broadside Press, an independent Detroit-based publishing company founded by Dudley Randall in 1965. Featured books include works by artists such as Audre Lorde, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Walker, Don L. Lee, Etheridge Knight and Dudley Randall. What is most striking about the encounter is the self-reflective quality of the readers, who often pause at irregular breaks in the poem to reflect on what they are reading. And if you pay close attention, you can actually see their eyes processing the information.

At different points in Fluid Frontiers, Asili shifts away from this encounter and focuses on the local environment. Coupled with images of stillness, we hear the voice of poet Margaret Walker reciting “Harriet Tubman”, bringing the Black Arts Movement in direct contact with The Underground Railroad. Then Asili cuts back to Black Detroit/Windsor natives reading poems in the streets, whose active presence supplies the words with the empowering acts that they need in order to come into being. In this moment, the presentness of the past is undeniable and liberation, much like the poems without the readers, feels unfinished. Perhaps that is the point.

Darol Olu Kae

Brochure Press Release

The Z Gallery is a space that explores new ways of associating film with art. It is neither a film season in a cinema nor a typical exhibition. It is a project that constructs a third space in the museum from which to visualise and analyse works by artists approaching the cinematographic field and filmmakers exploring the exhibition format. It is a programme that was created to think about the moving image in the museum, introducing authors seeking new narrative forms by questioning the conventions, genres and categorisations that have historically defined cinematographic language. Curator: Garbiñe Ortega

Programa especial de vacaciones de Pascua: exposiciones, visitas, talleres abiertos

Ainara Elgoibar’s installations, texts and films explore her interest in industrial activity in both productive and leisure environments. The factory, the engine, glass, music and entertainment are recurring themes in her work. The two audiovisual works on display in this room belong to the same research related to the production of Gold 20, a gold-coloured architectural glass that is produced by depositing a thin composition of metallic layers on one side of transparent glass sheets.

In addition to these films, the exhibition includes a final model – following others previously made by the artist of buildings that either used or contemplated using Gold 20 in their construction. The model in question is the upper cone of the Intempo tower in Benidorm. The Gold 20 piece featured in Glas Marte Cut was cast in order to produce this small-scale model.

Gold 20. 2014. HD video. 16 min 49 s
Gold 20 portrays the production process of this glass. Its aim is twofold: on the one hand, to gauge the danger with which this video record is perceived in the plant and, on the other hand, to explore the limits of video in order to represent this industrial process.

Glas Marte Cut. 2016. HD video. 18 min 5 s
Glas Marte Cut follows the process of reproducing a small piece of Gold 20 glass at Glas Marte Gmbh (Austria), a company dedicated to the production of large architectural elements. The commission was an excuse to film the company’s production activity, an exceptional exercise per se, but also because of the tiny scale of the piece.

Image: still from Gold 20. Ainara Elgoibar 2014

Press Release Brochure

The Z Gallery (Z for zinema, cinema in Basque) programme is neither a season of films nor an exhibition. It is a project that constructs an intermediate space from which to reflect on and draw attention to works by artists making the leap into the cinematographic field as well as filmmakers exploring the exhibition format. It is a programme arising from the determined gesture of thinking about the moving image in the museum. A programme that aims to bring to the public authors interested in searching for new narrative forms by questioning the genres that historically categorise cinematographic language.

Curator: Garbiñe Ortega

Escuelas y prácticas educativas experimentales de arte en el País Vasco 1957-1979

The centrepiece of the exhibition is Lucía con zeta, a video from 1998 in the museum’s collection that is shown in context with two other works by Munduate.

Contexts from a Collection, in addition to the case studies and rotations as part of the exhibition Zeru bat, hamaika bide, aims to raise awareness of the museum’s exceptional contemporary collection.

Artium Museoa, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the exhibition Cuerpos por un momento by Ion Munduate (A02 Gallery, until 29 May 2022) as part of its Contexts from a Collection programme. The centrepiece of the exhibition is Lucía con zeta, a video from 1998 that was acquired in 2020 as part of the Shared Collection initiative. Artium Museoa has produced a publication with a text by Sergio Prego to accompany the exhibition. One of the aims of Contexts from a Collection, alongside other initiatives, is to promote knowledge of the Artium Museum Collection by presenting recently acquired works alongside other pieces by the same artist.

The works that comprise Cuerpos por un momento share drawing and annotation as the origin of their execution, videos that have been made at various moments in the artist’s career. The beginning of each process, performance or video begins with drawing and is developed in various formats revolving around working from the body, text and space.

A thing becomes something else because it is moving, because it is situated between a moment immediately before and another immediately after. Each movement is based on a counter-movement, or on the fact that, in recovering movement, a trade-off or “breather” takes place, and this is what leads to its volume. From a situation of immobility produced by learning to dance, the artist had to rethink movement and its practice, to find the lost body.

The beginning of each process, performance or video commenced by drawing. The first being drawn, called Personne (Nobody), in his work Lucia con zeta (1998), was learning to walk. The series of drawings insisted on moving, on producing phrases of movement. The notion of notation and writing is what leads to the movement of this piece. This would be his first movement score as he attempted to trap time, the time of being.

He prioritised the notion of being a drawing, not a subject, during the reading of these drawings, thinking of the body in movement as a stroke. Thinking of a movement away from something, and towards something, the notion of interval. Interval understood in the sense of writer and translator Ashkan Sepahvand: “(...) as a process of hybridisation and mutation rather than that of separation, an act of renewal, not of transference”.

Ion Munduate (San Sebastian 1969) is trained in dance and performance, and he uses video in his work in addition to installations and performance. He was co-director of Mugatxoan between 1998 and 2012.

Contexts from a Collection

Thus, in addition to the permanent exhibition of the Artium Collection, Zeru bat, hamaika bide, the A01 Gallery generally hosts case studies and exhibitions linked to research work and the 1977-2002 period displayed in this exhibition. The Zeru bat, hamaika bide exhibition is periodically changed to add new internal routes. The creation of the #Bilduma series in Artium’s publications programme shares this same goal.

Artium’s acquisition programme helps to explore and report on the debates and practices taking place in the field of art today, as well as being an essential tool for sounding out a moment characterised by its dynamism and complexity. This is one of the basic tasks of the museum: to encourage the production of contemporary heritage and promote artists and their productions.

Artium Museum added Ion Munduate’s Lucía con zeta to its collection in 2020 as part of the Shared Collection acquisition programme promoted by the Basque Government.

Munduate begins the Contexts from a Collection programme in 2022. Daniel Llaría, Nadia Barkate and Lorea Alfaro were the artists forming part of the series in 2021.

The exhibition uses films, drawings and objects to focus on the figure of pioneering female authors in the creation of electronic music.

The projection area of the museum’s Z Gallery is presenting the films Oramics: Atlantis Anew, Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken and Hacer una diagonal con la música.

Aura Satz’s (Barcelona, 1974) work involves a mix of film, sound, performance and sculpture, focusing on the idea of ventriloquism to conceptualise a shared and expanded notion of voice. Her work is created in conversation by using dialogue as both method and subject.

She has staged performances and exhibitions at the Tate Modern (2012), BFI Southbank (2012), New York Film Festival (2013), Tate Britain (2014), Whitechapel Gallery (2016), NTT InterCommunication Centre, Tokyo (2017), SFMOMA, San Francisco (2017/18/19), Rotterdam Film Festival (2013-20) and MoMA NY (2020).

In Z Gallery programme, Aura Satz presents the films Oramics: Atlantis Anew, Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken and Hacer una diagonal con la música, three works based on three pioneers in the field of electronic music.

Hacer una diagonal con la música. 2019. 10 min.
A short film about Argentine electroacoustic composer Beatriz Ferreyra, a pioneer of musique concrète together with Pierre Schaeffer during the 1950s and 1960s. In this film, she discusses her “sound search” recording techniques and other thoughts on sound montage and spatialisation, including creaking doors, barking dogs and rainbow hands.

Oramics: Atlantis Anew. 2011. 7 min.
Conceived as an artist’s film that pays tribute to Daphne Oram, pioneer of British electronic music and co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, the film depicts a close encounter with her unique Oramics machine invention, housed in the Science Museum in London.

Little Doorways to Paths Not Yet Taken. 2016. 8 min.
Following Satz’s earlier films about women composers and inventors of electronic music, this short film offers an intimate look into the studio of American composer Laurie Spiegel (b. 1945). Renowned for her electronic music compositions and algorithmic composition software, the film also reveals all manner of musical and technological paraphernalia, ranging from sheet music to DIY inventions and collections of quirky toys. The soundtrack features electronic music composed by Spiegel and Laurie’s voiceover reflecting on electronic music and the process of composing.

Press Release Brochure 

The Z Gallery (Z for zinema, cinema in Basque) programme is neither a season of films nor an exhibition. It is a project that constructs an intermediate space from which to reflect on and draw attention to works by artists making the leap into the cinematographic field as well as filmmakers exploring the exhibition format. It is a programme arising from the determined gesture of thinking about the moving image in the museum. A programme that aims to bring to the public authors interested in searching for new narrative forms by questioning the genres that historically categorise cinematographic language.

Curator: Garbiñe Ortega