ITINERARIOS (ITINERARIES)
2011/2012
31 January–31 March 2013
Botín Foundation
Pedrueca 1, 39003
Santander, Spain
T +34 942 226 072
T +34 917 814 132
info [at] fundacionbotin.org
Artists: Antoni Abad (b. 1956, Lérida), Karmelo Bermejo (b. 1979, Málaga), André Guedes (b. 1976, Lisbon), Julia Montilla (b. 1970, Barcelona), Javier Nuñez Gasco (b. 1971, Salamanca), Joâo Onofre (b. 1976, Lisbon), Jorge Satorre (b. 1979, Mexico City) and David Zink Yi (b. 1973, Lima, Peru).
All these artists received the Visual Art Grant from the Botín Foundation in its 19th edition and were selected from among 908 applications received from 70 countries by Iria Candela, Juan de Nieves, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Juliâo Sarmento and a Foundation representative.
Every year, the exhibition calendar of the Botín Foundation opens with this joint exhibition, where the use by the artists of these nine months of intense creativity is assessed, showcasing a faithful view of their latest artistic proposals. A diversity of origins, work places, techniques, and concerns come together at the youngest and freshest offering displayed in the exhibition halls of the Botín Foundation.
Juan de Nieves, in the essay for the catalogue accompanying the show, explains, “The eight artists featured here test and transcend the limits of sculpture, installation, exhibition design, video and photography. They venture out into a wide range of disciplines that include art history and cultural manifestations, psychology, politics, economics and the social realm, to converge in a multi-faceted work that cannot be reduced to or classified as something either exclusively political or entirely formalist. Nevertheless, their works are rigorous in their formal devices and at the same time somewhat anarchic in their contents. For the most part, their practices are marked by an interest in working with other cultural agents and producers. With a spirit of exploration, they often delve head first into already-existing materials, such as documents on historical figures or references of the cultural identity of specific milieus. Other times, they take measures to revise the pathologies of both present and past.”
Regarding the artists, De Nieves points out that “André Guedes, Julia Montilla and Jorge Satorre explore different aspects of history as a means to offer a critical view of the current times. Their research is extensive and the mechanisms they use are manifest in the here and now of each exhibition, as they are subjected to transformations and subsequent re-use; a process that somewhat nullifies the notion of the single and decontextualised device. Discontinuity typifies many of their pieces, in which they preferably opt for lines of discourse that are as open-ended as the forms of visibilisation that result from their research.”
The practices of Karmelo Bermejo and Javier Núñez Gascó are associated with the paradoxes of the art system and its validation mechanisms, calling into question the very status of the art object and the accommodation and reception policies by both the institution and the audiences. In this sense, their work diverts the attention from the device or event to the rhetorical visibility and transparency processes over what is supposedly the “artistic” essence.
Antoni Abad has been working for more than a decade with different groups and communities at risk of social exclusion, using communication technologies as a fundamental tool for the visibilisation and normalisation of those communities in the globalised world.
João Onofre has created a simple and universal image: a tiny island that slowly floats along and gets lost on the horizon; a drifting refuge for those who disagree with the turn the world has taken.
David Zink Yi uses his work to explore cultural traditions from a horizontal and intimate perspective, both with groups and communities and with precise social and historical situations.
