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Indepth Arts News:
"Compostela: Lars Arrhenius, Gabriele Basilico, Roland Fischer, Gunther Forg, Ruben Ramos Balsa, Humberto Rivas, Lorna Simpson, Montserrat Soto, Beat Streuli, Peter Wüthrich"
2004-03-05 until 2005-05-30
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea
Santiago, ,
ES Spain
Compostela is an exhibition, which has been organised around ten
individual projects by artists who share their use of photography and
video, as well as a remarkable interest for the reflection on everyday
issues and references to natural and human landscape, urban
architectures, monuments or peripheral neighbourhoods, but also to
aspects, which are more difficult to symbolise, like the physiognomy -
spiritual, sentimental and mood-related- of a city or even the human
landscape. More than a collective exhibition on the city, Compostela is a
series of entwined projects, which try to compete with and to show the
present of the town.
Lars Arrhenius, Gabriele Basilico, Roland Fischer, Günther Förg, Rubén
Ramos Balsa, Humberto Rivas, Lorna Simpson, Montserrat Soto, Beat Streuli
and Peter Wüthrich were invited by Miguel Fernández-Cid, Head of the CGAC
and curator of the exhibition, to link their project to the city in a
broad sense, and, in an explicit or implicit manner, to its history. The
result is a significant series of unreleased pieces of work, even if in
two of them, the topic proposed was merged with an idea, which was
already underway.
Despite the visible presence of photography, video and computer animation
are other means selected by the artists, who stem from diversified
scenarios, which are alien to those with which the traditional image of
Santiago de Compostela is defended.
The projects under Compostela do not seek to represent the town, but to
revise the circumstances surrounding its present. Thus, the CGAC does not
forget its mission of contributing to the creation of active contents
with regard to the production of memory and is involved in the creation
of a more complex vision of the identity of this town through the
approaches of several of the most acknowledged artists of the
contemporary art scene.
With occasion of the exhibition Compostela, the CGAC will present a
detailed edition of individual catalogues, a publication including texts
by Xerardo Estévez, Miguel Fernández-Cid, Pablo Gallego and Margarita
Ledo and a series of art publications, which complete the publishing news
of this project.
1) Beat Streuli Praza de Galicia. August 03 I-III
(Altdorf, Switzerland, 1957)
Documenting the human presence in urban spaces is the main aim of the
work of this Swiss photographer, who, using his video camera, captures
with no additional decoration the people converging at a given point of
the town, which in this case is Porta da Mámoa. The perception of our
singularity amidst a crowd without knowing who is who ? essential
condition of Streuli's work ? led to an installation in which, for the
first time, he is faced with a town of reduced dimensions.
2) Gabriele Basilico - Fuoricentro
(Milan, Italy, 1944)
From the standpoint of a specialised tourist who goes beyond the
monumental heritage, Gabriele Basilico proposes a detained look at the
territory structured around three axes, which create peripheral urban
nuclei. He did not need a lot of time to get familiar with the area
through which the town grows, which he visited by car, a means of
transport we all use when we live outside the town centre. He stems from
this idea to portray, rather than the buildings-objects, the consequences
of our present lifestyle, when living is less dwelling and more moving
between limits.
3) Lars Arrhenius - The Street
(Stockholm, Sweden, 1966)
Computer animation is the technique used by the Swedish artist in this
unreleased piece of work, which tells of his pictographic version of
everyday events. The Street, made after his stay in Santiago, has one of
its main sources of inspiration in Jacques Tati's cinema. He proposes a
series of tales, where sound plays an important role, leading us for 24
hours throughout the Western post-industrial civilisation, which also
stretches over Compostela.
4) Günther Förg - Günther Förg fotografa a Facultade de Ciencias da
Comunicación
(Füssen, Germany, 1952)
The project conceived by this German artist, who is a great admirer of
depurated architectures, focuses on the architecture designed by Álvaro
Siza to shelter the Faculty of Sciences of Communication. When installing
his photographies at the CGAC, Förg stages a mirror-window interaction,
which stretches the initial concept (Siza's faculty) to the exhibition
rooms in the CGAC. The installation drags the visitor to vertigo by
proposing a reflection on the plane and space, on our concepts of
two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, on the transposition of the
spatial over the temporal.
5) Lorna Simpson - Corridor
(Brooklyn, New York, 1960)
The American artist, who is one of the most controversial presently,
invites the spectator to question certain clichés related to feminism,
racism or social relations, inciting us to remain alert to the
information we recur to in order to legitimise the knowledge we have of
the world. The video is located in two emblematic manors: Coffin House,
built by the descendents of the first English settlers, known as the
Pilgrim Fathers, and Gropius House, built in 1938 by Walter Gropius,
founder of the avant-garde Bauhaus.
6) Montserrat Soto - Huellas
(Barcelona, 1961)
The Catalonian artist presents a photographic installation based on
images of Compostela's industrial landscape scenarios, which are
exhibited together with other snapshots taken in different places. She
reminds us of the fact that beholding the landscape (something which is
alive, grows and fights, plays and struggles, which tries to survive and
destroys) is an exercise that surpasses the mere act of seeing. It is
above all a practice linked to speculation, to deduction The whole
installation is conceived with that aim: combining the history of our
gaze with a new experience.
7) Roland Fischer
(Munich, Germany)
After his individual exhibition at the CGAC, the German photographer was
invited to walk around the city in order to capture his personal
architectural portrays, condensing and fragmenting architecture, trying
to obtain in the portrayed fragment the most intimate peculiarity of the
whole building.
8) Rubén Ramos Balsa - Días solares
(Santiago de Compostela, 1978)
This young Galician creator offers a poetic vision of the city from
projects stemming from the prolonged exposure - 24, 48 or 72 hours - of
his handmade cameras located at different Compostela spots. The images
obtained lose their detail and substance, but gain suggestion. Colour
density is one of his innovations.
9) Humberto Rivas - Santiago
(Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1937)
Humberto Rivas is the only one of the artists we have gathered who is
directly inspired by the environment offered by historical architecture,
offering us his peculiar way of treating image.
The recipient of the National Photography Prize recovers the idea of
photographing the historical core of the town and contributes to the
exhibition with a personal melancholic vision of the stone buildings
surrounding the cathedral.
10) Peter Wüthrich - Biblioteca América
(Berne, Switzerland, 1962)
This Swiss artist who reconstructs situations from books presents a
photographic project conducted at the America Library in the University
of Santiago, complemented by a course along the streets of the old town
centre with angels as our guides. Reconstructing situations from books is
an artistic manoeuvre conceived by Peter Wüthrich, who, in this case,
associates lyricism and satire, material and immaterial patrimonies in a
playful reflection on some of the most visible symbols in Santiago de
Compostela.
IMAGE
Lorna Simpson
Corridor, 2003
double video projection,
duration of single cycle 13:49:15.
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