Animated Stories
30 October 2006 to 7 January 2007
Curated by Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, Laurence Dreyfus, Marta Gili and Neus Miró.
sala rekalde
Alameda de Recalde, 30
Bilbao 48009 (Spain)
www.salarekalde.bizkaia.net
sala rekalde presents Animated Stories, a group exhibition that gathers together the work of thirty international artists whose output investigates new strategies in animation film and the potential it has for criticality.
Animated Stories explores drawing and digital animation in relation to their artistic potential for imagining and producing stories to critically reflect on the world around us. The works shown in this exhibition have in common a special relationship with original sources such as caricature, satire, fable and allegory, used to question concepts like truth, authenticity and evidence. Moreover, parody is the strategy that situates animated film squarely between the real and the fictional so as to unveil the limits between what should or should not be said and between the appropriate and the inappropriate.
The focus of the exhibition is not an analysis of the various contemporary animation techniques employed in the works, but rather an exploration of the extent to which creative strategies are capable of assuming critical responsibilities in the face of the current predominance of mass media disinformation and the consequent discrediting of image. In this respect, animation film opens up a new line that runs parallel to documentary strategies, within a shared aim of commitment to disarticulate the politics of truth and unfrock authoritarian voices that might narrow the representational terrain.
Within a referential endeavour, the exhibition opens with a clear example of the potential animated film has for weaving magic whilst being critically incisive, in the shape of the video-installation Journey to the Moon (2003), in which the artist William Kentridge intentionally pays homage to the legacy of Georges Méliès. Through fantasy and imagination, some of the artists of Animated Stories directly mount attacks on policies that promote speculation and the devastation of our surroundings (as in the case of the works by Donna Conlon, Till Nowak, Hans Op de Beeck and Miguel Soares), while others (Kao Chung-li, Cristina Lucas and Feng Mengbo) disarticulate the politics of truth by retrieving stories withheld from History. The representation of absence, fear and exclusion (Carlos Amorales, J. Tobias Anderson, Zilla Leutenegger, Sven Pahlsson, Magnus Wallin, Sara Serrano and Eduardo Balanza) and the construction of notions such as community and subjectivity in a period of rampant cultural capitalism (Benoît Broisat, Shelley Eshkar, Paul Kaiser, Simon Faithfull, Ruth Gómez, Basim Magdy, Joshua Mosley, Yusuke Sakamoto, Martijn Veldhoen, Catharina van Eetvelde and Abigail Lang) are some of the other issues addressed.
In addition, the exhibitions documentary space presents a selection of short films made by Catalan amateur authors who, during the seventies and eighties, used animation as a vehicle to create a critical voice of contemporary social reality. This section includes works by Jordi Tomàs and Francesc Estrada, Jan Baca and Toni Garriga, Anna Miquel and Domènec Aran and Arturo O´Neill.
This show, produced by “la Caixa” Foundation, Spain, and Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains, France, brings together some of the most recent works by 30 international artists: Carlos Amorales, J. Tobias Anderson, Lars Arrhenius, Benoît Broisat, Donna Conlon, Catharina Van Eetvelde / Abigail Lang, Shelley Eshkar/ Paul Kaiser, Kota Ezawa, Simon Faithfull, Ruth Gómez, Susanne Jirkuff, Chung-Li Kao, William Kentridge, Zilla Leutenegger, Cristina Lucas, Cecilia Lundqvist, Basim Magdy, Feng Mengbo, Joshua Mosley, Till Nowak, Hans Op de Beeck, Sven Pahlsson, Arthur de Pins, Yusuke Sakamoto, Sara Serrano / Eduardo Balanza, Miguel Soares, Sheila M. Sofian, Martin Veldhoen, Magnus Wallin and Lev Yilmaz.
Animated Stories was presented for the first time at CaixaForum, Barcelona, in June 2006 and will subsequently be shown at Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains in Tourcoing, France.
Animated Stories
30 October 2006 to 7 January 2007
Curated by Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, Laurence Dreyfus, Marta Gili and Neus Miró.
sala rekalde
Alameda de Recalde, 30
Bilbao 48009 (Spain)
For further information please contact:
Constanza Erkoreka
Tel: ( 34) 94 406 87 07
salarekalde@bizkaia.net
Information service:
Tel. ( 34) 94 470 37 07
