Beatriz González: Retrospective 1965-2017 / Jumana Manna: Wild Relatives

This fall, CAPC is proud to present in Bordeaux the first major retrospective of Beatriz González in Europe. Including paintings, drawings, etchings, sculptures, and installations, the show gathers some 130 works coming from different public and private collections around the world. The museum will also be premiering Jumana Manna’s new film Wild Relatives, as the final instalment of the exhibition cycle The Economy of Living Things, curated by Osei Bonsu for the tenth anniversary edition of the Satellite Programme.

Beatriz González: Retrospective 1965-2017
Beatriz González (b.1936 in Bucaramanga, Colombia) is an emblematic and fundamental artist from the Latin American art scene who has left a mark on generations of artists and thinkers. Her work pushes the boundaries of painting by expanding the media employed and bringing together history, politics, humour, the private, and the public.

In 1964 she adopted a working process that has remained persistent in her work, involving the making of painting series that take images from the Colombian press as their starting point. Her archive of collected images shows to what extent her work is informed by popular imagery, constituting a fertile ground for research and art making from which folklore and the picturesque are extracted. Often using reporters’ photographic work as a starting point, several works express the pain provoked by violence and death. Commenting on this aspect of González’s work, Boris Groys states that far from aiming towards neutrality through her appropriation of images from the press, “her painting remains personal and even intimate. She finds a way to turn the newspapers into her own personal, intimate diary—and also to make her own diary look political.”

Beatriz González also shows an interest in the representation of popular culture icons, from sports stars to politicians or religious leaders, as well as representations of aboriginal cultures and Pre-Columbian art. Her pieces, presented as ready-mades, may take a range of different forms such as furniture or curtains. Forever active, the artist accompanies Colombia’s strong social and political changes, and ironically describes herself as a “regional artist.”

Curator: María Inés Rodríguez
Architecture of the exhibition: Terence Gower & Beatriz González Studio
An exhibition by the CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

An event organized as part of The Year France-Colombia 2017.

This exhibition is recognized as being of “Intérêt national” by the “Ministère de la Culture/Direction générale des patrimoines/Service des musées de France”. As such it benefits exceptionally from financial support from the French State.
It also receives the support of Catherine Petitgas
Acknowledgements to Galería Casas Riegner, Bogotá and Ana Sokoloff

Jumana Manna: Wild Relatives
In recent projects, Jumana Manna (b.1987) has used film and sculpture to recompose various archival materials that pertain to historical narratives of the Levant and northern Europe; at times as separate geographies and others, in relation to one another. These works have explored the ways in which economic, political, and interpersonal forms of power, condition architectural sites as well as human and plant life. Manna has a particular interest in the erasures that accompany various modern scientific preservation practices, yet her projects always challenge binary constructions of supposedly pure, authentic, unchanging heritage one hand, and the embrace of technological advances on the other. In her newly commissioned feature Wild Relatives, Manna follows the matrix of hierarchies and relationships involved in a transaction of seeds between the Norwegian town of Longyearbyen in Svalbard, an island in the Arctic Ocean, and the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon. The film travels the path of these seeds and traces motifs of extracting and placing different life forms from and into the ground, back and forth from dry lands to permafrost. It tackles intertwining global environmental and ideological issues through the simple quotidian lives of people.

Curator: Osei Bonsu
Satellite programme 2017: The Economy of Living Things, co-produced by Jeu de Paume, Paris, FNAGP and CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux.

Also on view
4.543 billion. The matter of matter
Curated by Latitudes
Until January 7, 2018

[sic] works from the CAPC Collection
2nd Instalment
Curator: José Luis Blondet
Permanent exhibition

Upcoming
Damir Ocko
Curator: Agnès Violeau
Satellite programme 2018: Newspeak
February 8–May 6, 2018

Benoît Maire: Thebes
Curator: Alice Motard
March 8–September 2, 2018

The CAPC musée d’art contemporain is a museum of the City of Bordeaux.

Museum patrons
Honorary patron: Château Haut-Bailly

Founding patron: Les Amis du CAPC
Leading patrons: Fondation Daniel & Nina Carasso, Lacoste Traiteur
Patrons: SUEZ, Mercure Bordeaux Cité Mondiale, Château Chasse-Spleen, SLTE, Château Le Bonnat, Le Petit Commerce

Press
Pedro Jiménez Morrás
T +33 (0)5 56 00 81 70 / p.jimenezmorras [​at​] mairie-bordeaux.fr