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The film is the result of a four-year project by Baudelaire with a group of students from the Dora Maar school in Paris. “It is not a film about the children, it is a film by the children” that captures the moments when these teenagers begin to become aware of their surroundings and adopt critical and political stances.
Con motivo de la apertura de la exposición Un film dramatique, de Éric Baudelaire, dentro del programa Sala Z (apertura: jueves 25 de noviembre, desde las 11:00 horas).
Proyección de la película en el Auditorio del museo, con presentación a cargo de la comisaria Garbiñe Ortega.
Miércoles 24 de noviembre, 18:00 horas
Entrada gratuita. Aforo limitado. Inscripciones: 945 20 90 20
¿Qué estamos haciendo juntos? Es una pregunta recurrente para los estudiantes de la clase de cine en la escuela de secundaria Dora Maar, y para Eric Baudelaire (Salt Lake City, EEUU, 1973), que trabajó con ellos durante cuatro años. Responder a esta pregunta política —que conlleva representaciones de poder, violencia social e identidad— los llevó a buscar una forma cinematográfica que hiciera justicia a la singularidad de cada estudiante, pero también a la esencia de su grupo.
Éric Baudelaire (1973) es un artista y cineasta afincado en París. Tras cursar estudios de ciencias políticas, Baudelaire se forjó un nombre como artista visual gracias a una práctica basada en la investigación que incorpora fotografía, imágenes impresas y vídeo. El cine ha ocupado un lugar fundamental en su obra desde 2010.
Artium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the exhibition Mariana Castillo Deball. Amarantus (A2 Gallery, until 13 March 2022). The exhibition brings together an extensive selection of works produced primarily over the past decade in which we can trace Castillo Deball’s interest in the way in which knowledge and culture are produced, represented and disseminated, and specifically in the processes of appropriating and re-coding pre-colonial Mexican history. Artium Museum has produced a publication to accompany the exhibition that includes an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Catalina Lozano. Amarantus has been organised in collaboration with Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (Germany) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico).
Amarantus presents a selection of artworks by Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, 1975) who, ever since her early works, has been interested in the way in which knowledge and culture are produced, represented and disseminated. Working diagonally between the visual arts, science and fiction, the artist has looked into how pre-colonial Mexican history has been investigated, appropriated and re-codified at various times.
Mariana Castillo Deball (Mexico City, 1975) has shaped a vast body of work that tackles the way in which knowledge and culture are produced, represented and disseminated, positioning herself in the junctions between science, fiction and the visual arts and their relation to the ways that pre-colonial Mexican history has been appropriated and investigated at various times.
Castillo Deball uses a kaleidoscopic approach to her interests to explore archaeology, science, literature and technology, and she has collaborated with museums and institutions outside the realm of contemporary art.
Ever since her early works, the artist has explored how chance – the product of time passed, erosion, fragmentation and human interventions, among other factors – largely determines the way that we learn to describe the world and the narratives we create. This interest has led her to explore the history of specific artefacts – which she calls “uncomfortable objects” – their paths, reproductions, appropriations and disappearances.
Her formal strategies are often akin to the methodologies employed by archaeologists to “trap” their discoveries. These objects, or surrogate images, are conceptually similar to the ancient Nahua notion of ixiptla, which can be interpreted as representation, image and substitute, but also skin. This concept is crucial for exploring many of Castillo Deball’s projects over the past decade.
The word amarantus, which gives the exhibition its name, comes from the Greek Αμάρανθος and designates a flower that never dies – like the amaranth, an indispensable plant in traditional Mexican diets that never withers. The amaranth flower evokes the persistence of these “uncomfortable objects”, the material remains of random historical events that fascinate Castillo Deball.
In collaboration with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen (Germany) and Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico).
The exhibition brings together a wide selection of paintings from her Social Landscapes series, which the artist began in the 1990s. Txaro Arrazola creates disturbing contemporary landscapes that show the devastating effects of human action on the planet and its people
Artium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the exhibition Txaro Arrazola. A Magnificent Exploitation (A1 Gallery, until 13 March 2022). The exhibition brings together a wide selection of paintings from her Social Landscapes series, which the artist has been developing since the 1990s and in which she paints scenes that represent the devastating effects of direct or indirect human action on the planet and its people. A Magnificent Exploitation, curated by Xabier Arakistain, also presents other pieces from this early period, including drawings, photographs and patchworks made from clothes acquired in Salvation Army shops. Artium Museum has also published a book with essays by Arakistain and Rocío de la Villa to accompany this exhibition.
It is indeed paradoxical that ‘explotar’ means three things in Spanish: “to extract from the earth its wealth”, “to exploit the work or qualities of another person for one’s own benefit” and “to blow up, to make an explosion”. The title of this exhibition uses these three meanings of the verb to suggest connections between them from which to approach the idea of contemporary landscape in the work of Txaro Arrazola (Vitoria-Gasteiz 1963).
Una magnífica explotación (A Magnificent Exploitation) brings together a wide selection of paintings from her series Paisajes sociales (Social Landscapes), which Txaro Arrazola has been producing since 1993, when she completed her first drawings of the landscape views that could be seen from the large window of her studio in an old factory in the then dilapidated neighbourhood of Bushwick, New York. Her drawings from life were subsequently replaced as a reference for her paintings by images that she took from newspapers and magazines. Extracting images and journalistic photographs from the news briefs conferred by their medium and transcending the everyday nature of the daily press to convert these into artistic artefacts extends their temporality and, above all, exponentially expands their functionality.
Arrazola would use this displacement to create disturbing contemporary landscapes from various parts of the world that display all manner of destruction caused by direct or indirect human action. Landscapes portraying situations of extreme poverty, favelas, war refugee camps or those of migrants for climatic or economic reasons. These sombre or directly dark paintings have very few colours and they depict an unhappy world in which people never appear.
In keeping with the idea of proximity so as not to disrupt the impression that the works extend beyond the limits of the canvas, the paintings are not framed. Nor are they framed in the past. Unfortunately today, just as 30 years ago, the works remain strictly topical. Txaro Arrazola’s social landscapes are still an all too familiar everyday scene.
Txaro Arrazola
Txaro Arrazola graduated in Fine Arts from UPV/EHU in 1988. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship (1996-1997) and MFA from the State University of New York, Purchase College (1996-1998) and has a PhD in Fine Arts (2012). Her work is characterised by social engagement, feminist critique of representation and research into collaborative methodologies.
She combines her individual artistic practice of painting with transdisciplinary projects and group projects, including actions produced with the Plataforma A collective in public spaces. Her work has been exhibited at Galería Vanguardia (Bilbao, 2019, 2014, 2014, 2011, 2007); Fundación Pedro Modesto Campos (Tenerife 2007); Centro Cultural Montehermoso (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2008, 2005), and Kunstarkaden Der Stadt (Munich 2008), among other spaces and institutions.
The exhibition do mess with me includes the videos <3 S P S <3 BLOOD and <3 S P S <3 INK, acquired in 2020 as part of the Basque Government’s support plan for the artistic sector.
In the same manner as the case studies and rotations within the exhibition Zeru bat, hamaika bide, Contexts from a Collection aims to increase the visibility of the museum’s outstanding contemporary collection.
As part of its Contexts from a Collection exhibition programme, Artium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents two videos by the artist Lorea Alfaro: <3 S P S <3 BLOOD and <3 S P S <3 INK, which have been recently added to the museum’s collection (A02 Gallery, until 16 January 2022). The exhibition do mess with me also includes a selection of works by Alfaro alongside these two pieces, including works made with wallpaper, Paski and Paretara, and the video Tú re-post. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication do mess with me, which contains a conversation between Lorea Alfaro and the photographer Rafa Castells. Contexts from a Collection is a series of exhibitions dedicated to showcasing the works of artists that have recently been added to the museum’s collection.
<3 S P S <3 (2016-2017) is a portrait and part of the design of a tailor-made silk shirt for the sitter, a singer from the Spanish trap scene. Lorea Alfaro views the design of the shirt like the making of a mould: “A mould is a piece [SHIRT], or number of coupled pieces [PATTERN], internally hollow but with the external details and imprints of the future solid that one wishes to obtain [HIM]. A flexible mould [SILK] is usually assembled with a rigid counter-mould [VIDEO] or ‘mother’ [MOTHER] that holds the shape to prevent its deformation [VIDEO]. The advantage of flexible moulds is that they can be removed more delicately [SILK], leading to a better result for the piece. It is also lighter [SILK] and more durable [ARTE]”.
The print on the shirt is a repeated motif of a tattoo that was on the forearm of one of her relatives. This same motif has had other bodies in previous works such as Paretara (2014) or the Paski #mablood scarf (2015). These repetitions, present in all her work, signal the artist’s interest in seeking ways of incorporating elements into life that stem from a type of attention, care and time, different from those found in everyday objects.
Lorea Alfaro (Estella Lizarra, 1982) is an artist. Her most recent works can be seen in the exhibitions 2020, together with Jon Otamendi (Fundación Joan Miró, 2021), Un mundo sin cualidades (Galería CarrerasMugica, 2020) or No lo banalices (Galería CarerrasMugica, 2018, 948 Merkatua, 2019). She has been working through the hollow brand LA (3l3a) since 2014.
This British artist is renowned for her film work, which she combines with her interest in painting and printmaking.
Nashashibi’s work shows “how important it is to build human bonds that can (...) enable a more enjoyable and lovable existence”.
The exhibition includes several paintings produced during the artist’s stay at Artium Museum in order to set up of the project.
Artium Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the artist Rosalind Nashashibi in a new exhibition project for its Z Gallery programme (until 14 November 2021). The show includes the screening of two films by this British artist, Vivian’s Garden and Part One: Where There Is a Joyous Mood, There a Comrade Will Appear to Share a Glass of Wine, as well as several paintings produced by Nashashibi during her stay at the museum in order to prepare this exhibition. The museum has also produced a publication with a text by Francisco Salas to accompany the show.
Rosalind Nashashibi's recent exhibitions include those held in museums and institutions such as Secession, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago, and Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, among others, and her presence in international events such as the 52nd Venice Biennale, Manifesta 7, Sharjah 10 and Documenta 14 is also worth noting. She has won various awards, including the Beck’s Futures art prize in 2003, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017.
What are we doing together? It is a recurring question for the students in the film class at Dora Maar High School, as well as for Eric Baudelaire (Salt Lake City, USA, 1973), who worked with them for four years. Answering this political question –which involves representations of power, social violence and identity– led them to search for a cinematic form that would do justice not only to the uniqueness of each student, but also to the essence of their group.
What are we doing together if not a documentary or fiction? A dramatic film, perhaps, in which time works upon the bodies and discourse of the students, and in which we discover the possibility of each person speaking on their own behalf by filming for others and becoming co-authors of the film and subjects of their own lives.
Eric Baudelaire is an artist and filmmaker. His recent feature films include Also Known As Jihadi (2017), Letters to Max (2014), The Ugly One (2013) and The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images (2011), all of which have been widely screened at film festivals such as Locarno, Toronto, New York, Marseille and Rotterdam.
Curator: Garbiñe Ortega
The Z Gallery (Z for zinema, cinema in Basque) programme aims to bring to the public authors interested in searching for new narrative forms by questioning the genres that historically categorise cinematographic language. 2021 season of the programme we want to highlight the interest and research deployed by their authors on the idea of the collective, as well as the ways in which to continue thinking and working together to project a shared future.
The British-Palestinian artist Rosalind Nashashibi (Croydon, London, 1973) is renowned for her film work, which she produces simultaneously with her work in painting and printmaking. Through her meditative, slow-paced films, she suggests a flexible treatment of time that occasionally seems to be suspended.
The artist is presenting two pieces from her filmography (Vivian's Garden y Part One: Where There Is a Joyous Mood, There a Comrade Will Appear to Share a Glass of Wine) on the occasion of her participation in this series at the Museum.
Her recent exhibitions include those held in museums and institutions such as Secession, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago, and Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, among others, and her presence in international events such as the 52nd Venice Biennale, Manifesta 7, Sharjah 10 and Documenta 14 is also worth noting. She has won various awards, including the Beck’s Futures art prize in 2003, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017.
Conversation with Rosalind Nashashibi at Artium Museum: Thursday 16 September, 6:00 pm.
Curator: Garbiñe Ortega
The Z Gallery (Z for zinema, cinema in Basque) programme aims to bring to the public authors interested in searching for new narrative forms by questioning the genres that historically categorise cinematographic language. 2021 season of the programme we want to highlight the interest and research deployed by their authors on the idea of the collective, as well as the ways in which to continue thinking and working together to project a shared future.
The film is part of the Z Gallery programme and portrays a territory in transformation after years of abandonment of agricultural activity. The film combines scenes shot on 16 mm film as well as images obtained by digital means.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the premiere of Paraíso, a new film by the directors Maddi Barber and Marina Lameiro, produced as part of Artium Museum’s Z Gallery programme. The film leads us through a territory in transformation that its inhabitants want to recover after decades of abandonment of agricultural activity. Barber and Lameiro combine filmed scenes with images recorded by using digital data capture technologies. In order to mark this exhibition, Artium Museum has published a publication with an essay by María Palacios Cruz, curator, lecturer and researcher on moving images. The film was produced in collaboration with the Mondragon Corporation. The Z Gallery programme is curated by Garbiñe Ortega.
The film begins in darkness with the sound of a woman’s voice describing the images that she sees or has been allowed to see. As María Palacios Cruz explains: “She understands them as referring to ‘death’, but there is no sadness, no heaviness about them. It is all part of the natural order of things; death and life are inseparable. Later, we will learn that the images the woman is describing are the voices of trees in a woodland area that has been marked for deforestation”. After the villages in the Arce Valley were abandoned in the 1960s, the Government of Navarre planted pine trees in the fields that were tilled or used as pasture for animals. More than 50 years later, they have decided to cut down the pine trees in one of these villages to recover the fields, the agricultural practices and the way of life that was on the verge of disappearing with the depopulation of the rural areas in favour of the cities. Its inhabitants have always called this place “Paradise”.
Maddi Barber and Marina Lameiro have made this film by combining analogue 16mm filming, with its specific texture, and digital image capture using a three-dimensional landscape scanner. The exhibition also includes a series of topographic maps and orthophotographs from various periods that show the successive transformation of this territory of the Arce Valley, in addition to a herbarium with samples collected in the area where the film was shot. The project is completed by a series of making-of stills and a sound piece that preserves the memory of the sounds of the forest.
Paraíso is the first collaboration between Maddi Barber and Marina Lameiro. Both Barber and Lameiro have engaged with collective and participatory processes before, but more than an exchange between their respective artistic practices, Paraíso proposes one with (and between) the inhabitants of the forests around Lakabe, both human and non-human; a story told by the trees that are to be felled to make way for pastureland.
The exhibition reviews a series of historical pedagogical practices based on self-construction and play to create a space for meeting and learning. The exhibition also includes works by artists such as Carme Nogueira, Raphael Escobar and Abraham Cruzvillegas
Artium Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country presents the exhibition Self-construction. Loose Parts. Play and Experience. Antonio Ballester Moreno (A3 Gallery, until 1 November 2021). The project stems from Artium’s process of reflecting on its relationship with its urban and social context and specifically on the potential of its inner courtyard as a meeting point for its surrounding area. Ballester, an artist with whom Artium has discussed this issue, reviews a series of historical pedagogical practices based on self-construction and play to create in this project, which has been designed not to be an exhibition in the usual sense, a space for meeting and learning. The exhibition, which also includes works by Carme Nogueira, Raphael Escobar and Abraham Cruzvillegas, is curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa and has been produced in collaboration with Dinamoa Sormen Gunea in Azpeitia and the students and teaching staff of Barrutia Ikastola in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
Antonio Ballester Moreno’s exhibition Self-construction. Loose Parts. Play and Experience is the result of various collaborative processes that were begun as part of Plazaratu, the reflection process on Artium’s connection as an institution and architectural structure with its surroundings and its ability to become a meeting point and centre for social relations.
Ballester Moreno uses methods tied to pedagogy in his artistic practice and in several projects involves groups of schoolchildren and occasionally adults to shape an initial idea. In his proposal for Artium Museum, the artist has referred to a series of pedagogical practices developed in the 20th century that were based on self-construction as play as well as to transforming action – building, rebuilding, repairing, remodelling – into a way of learning, education and living. The English architect Lady Allen of Hurtwood, the Danish activist Palle Nielsen, the Italian architect Enzo Mari and the English artist Simon Nicholson are some of the figures that inspired these experiences, as the curator Ángel Calvo Ulloa explains at length in the publication accompanying this exhibition.
Artium’s A3 Gallery is therefore housing objects produced in the workshops conducted in spring by Antonio Ballester Moreno in an educational centre such as Barrutia Ikastola in Vitoria-Gasteiz and in a creative space such as Dinamoa Sormen Gunea in Azpeitia.
In the case of Barrutia Ikastola, following the practice of Enzo Mari and his autoprogettazione? manual, as well as Simon Nicholson’s Theory of Loose Parts, the artist invited students, families and teachers to participate in a workshop to construct furniture. Created using basic pieces and tools and following plans and instructions produced for that purpose, these objects – tables, benches, platforms, cabins – have converted the A3 Gallery into a square, a park that also opens up to Artium’s outdoor area, to its urban garden.
The exhibition also includes the installation of a large mural measuring 30 metres long by 4 metres high that features a set of 164 silkscreen prints produced in the workshop that Ballester Moreno directed at Dinamoa Sormen Gunea based on the designs proposed by the artist.
This tendency of Ballester Moreno “to work on projects that are diluted in the collective”, as the curator points out, is underlined by the invitation to other artists to participate in Self-construction...: Carme Nogueira and the workshops she developed based on Buñuel's documentary Las Hurdes, Tierra Sin Pan and the innovative pedagogical experiences developed in that region of Extremadura in the 1930s, Raphael Escobar and Os Cupins das Artes and the workshops conducted with homeless people in São Paulo, and Abraham Cruzvillegas and the processes of self-construction rooted in the working-class neighbourhoods of Mexico City that can be traced back in his artistic practice.
Ballester Moreno has staged solo exhibitions at Museo Patio Herreriano in Valladolid; La Casa Encendida in Madrid; MAZ in Guadalajara, Mexico; MUSAC in León; Galería Maisterra-Valbuena in Madrid; Pedro Cera in Lisbon; Christopher Grimes in Santa Monica, and Peres Projects in Berlin and Los Angeles. He has also participated in group exhibitions, such as at the 33rd Sao Paulo Biennial, as artist and curator, MSU Broad Museum in Michigan and CA2M in Madrid, as well as in galleries in New York, Berlin and Los Angeles, among others. His work can be found in the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, MUSAC in León, CA2M in Madrid, Colección Iberdrola and Fundación Helga de Alvear.
Press release (pdf) Image request List of works Exhibition
Antonio Ballester Moreno. Self-construction. Loose Parts. Play and Experience
A3 Gallery, from 25 June to 1 November 2021
Curator: Ángel Calvo Ulloa
Publication with essay by Ángel Calvo Ulloa
Conversation with the artist: Friday 25 June at 6pm
Special opening hours: open continuously from 11am to 8pm
This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Barrutia Ikastola in Vitoria-Gasteiz and Dinamoa Sormen Gunea in Azpeitia
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