WITNESSES/TESTIGOS
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NMAC Foundation
24th June 2006
For more information:
NMAC Foundation
Ctra N.340 km. 42,5
Vejer de la Frontera 11150
Cadiz – Spain
The exhibition WITNESSES/TESTIGOS will deal with current cultural and socio-political events that affect border territories at the crossroads of cultures, traditions, countries, and religions. The NMAC Foundation, located at the southernmost tip of the Iberian Peninsula, in the province of Cadiz, will be the point of departure for the projects of artists depicting a local situation with global repercussions, and consequently, with an impact in different places around the world.
These unique, site-specific projectsby the artists Adel Abdessemed, Maja Bajevic, Jeppe Hein, Cristina Lucas, Pascale Marthine Tayou, Aleksandra Mir, Jesús Palomino, Gregor Schneider, and Shen Yuanwill bring the viewer closer to such issues as the territory, collective identity, tragedy, destiny, construction, and deconstruction of history, ideologies, and sociology. These elements will work together to create a catalysing effect, giving birth to different narratives referring to memory and identity, catching the viewers eye, which should sift through the subtleties of these different languages, in the form of installations, sculptures, and photography- and video-based pieces.
As Jimena Blázquez, the exhibitions curator, writes in its catalogue, The events of our most recent history show us that, now more than ever, we need a space for reconciliation, establishing new forms of understanding, opening frontiers towards multiculturalism, through which we can create places for reflection, where private beliefs can subsist in the public space as a place for dialogue and tolerance….
Through art, culture, and artistic expression, new ties can be established with society and its historic heritage. The balance between the public and the private, the local and the global can, undoubtedly, lead to new ways of understanding, adapted to recent events. The uncertainty that arises in human beings when they are surrounded by realities that seem to be but are not, is translated, at an artistic level, in a wide range of visual explorations with a strong critical content, sometimes developed outside the artists own identity. This is why the artists from the exhibition WITNESSES/TESTIGOS, through their projects, create a testimony of these circumstances at the local level, of the socio-political and cultural events in a border territory between two civilisations, a space marked by immigration, which is a crossroads of continents, cultures, religions, and traditions.
From the beginning, the NMAC Foundation, over five years of programming, has been firmly committed to reinventing the public space as a place for reflection. Supporting creators in projects where the language of art and aesthetics act as a means of fighting against extremism, racism, and inequality, as a way of reactivating collective memory, seeking paths to understanding, encounters sparked by aesthetic fascination. The celebration of the NMAC Foundations fifth anniversary will coincide with the inauguration of this exhibition, which aims, through its different projects and their intensity, to generate reaction, thought, movement, rebellion, and action, combating the terrifying passivity and somnolence in the face of situations of inequality, injustice, oppression, and lack of freedom.
On the same day, a 1999 piece by Olafur Eliasson (Denmark), Your Circumspection Disclosed, will be presented; it is now installed in one of NMACs barracks, since it is on loan by the artist to the Foundation.
Along with this exhibition, the NMAC Foundation will co-edit a catalogue, in Spanish and English, with the Italian publishers CHARTA, featuring texts by Marcella Beccaria, Jimena Blázquez, Jorge Casanova, Evelyne Jouanno, Roberto Pinto, Michele Robecchi, Sergio Rubira, Jérôme Sans, Víctor Silva, and Gilane Tawadros.
For more information:
NMAC Foundation
Ctra N.340 km. 42,5
Vejer de la Frontera 11150
Cadiz – Spain
T: 34 956 455 134
F: 34 956 455 135
E-mail: nmac@fundacionnmac.com
