Gallery Façade. May, 2017.
Rogelio López Cuenca. You needn't kill too many for everyone to be silent. 2017. 100 x 70 cm. Printing on lambda photographic paper.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Teresa Henriques. Lady Nasty. 2017. 178 x 75 x 75 cm. Wrought iron washbasin with mirror on pedestal.
Rogelio López Cuenca. You needn't kill too many for everyone to be silent. 2017. 100 x 70 cm. Printing on lambda photographic paper.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Eugenio Dittborn. Have you seen this man?. 1991. 210 x 140 cm. Paint, yarn, pen and photo silkscreened on synthetic interlining fragment.
Exhibition view.
Information
Gallery Moisés Pérez de Albéniz is pleased to announce the exhibition Exclusions and Censorship 2 featuring work by Dennis Adams, Ana Laura Aláez, Eugenio Dittborn, Willie Doherty, Gilbert & George, Mona Hatoum, Teresa Henriques, Emily Jacir, Jürgen Klauke, Rogelio López Cuenca, Cildo Meireles, Antoni Muntadas, Itziar Okariz, Doris Salcedo and Richard Serra.
What I have read, what I have heard, what I have seen… Daily allusions to contact with reality through the classic senses appear to have perverted the use of the first person. What I have read, what I have heard or seen in the newspaper, television, or on social networks is sufficient to give a perceptive sensation of its own, a personal story. I can tell you about it as if I had been there, when in reality we restrict ourselves to reading, listening, or seeing the story of someone else. In the past, real was what today we call the truth. Words alter their meanings, perceptions don’t happen by chance, and reality, or truth, remains blurred in its humble corners without witnesses, at the expense of the guardians of information. An overflow organized by the “official rapporteurs” and narrators of a media syndrome that begins to be picked up in Warhol and later Jenny Holzer.
Warhol and Holzer reverberate in Patricia Hearst A Thru Z (1979), a work included in this exhibition by the North American artist Dennis Adams. The photographic grouping tells the story- which of them can we ask?- about the Hearst heiress’s activities in the 70s when she put her privileged life aside and became the protagonist of a kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, ultimately leading ultra leftist, violent attacks in the name of a terrorist group that had taken her freedom. This ensemble of portraits along the lines of Warhol’s Marilyn series creates a new version of Patty Hearst, once again bringing forth questions about what is seen. The symptom, or sign of exceeding what it means, for Baudrillard, of a society altered by its stories is that in the end what is able to be seen is what is no longer visible, a global territory of surreptitious censorship in which half always remains invisible, blinded to this new sense of high profile first person. It is in this territory, in “revealing the distribution of the evident” according to Rancière, where the works included in Exclusions and Censorship 2 move, in continuation from the first exhibition surrounding these themes that took place in 2008 at Gallery Moisés Pérez de Albéniz in Pamplona.
Mona Hatoum converses dialectically about exclusions and censorship in Over My Dead Body (2005), a piece with a political tinge, an anti-war work that operates in a tone that is almost propagandistic. The satire of violence also appears in Have you Seen This Man? (1991) by the Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, in which he highlights the violent and corroded image of a victim of Pinochet’s dictatorship on the front page in an important national newspaper.
How many questions do we ask about what we see, what we hear, what we listen to? It is a question that goes through the majority of the works included here, like Emily Jacir’s installation Crossing Surda. A record of going to and from work (2002), or Doris Salcedo’s photographs of the giant crevice that she opened at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2007 during her exhibition, Shibboleth. According to the writers of the Bible, shibboleth was the word that the Gileadites used to distinguish themselves from the Tribe of Ephraim when they crossed the River Jordan. Those who didn’t know how to pronounce the word were directly excluded, their throats slit on their journey towards a better future.
This expository archive of exclusions and censorship brings out the ideas of official oblivion, losers of a story that has been perfected towards sophistication like what appears already in Martin Heidegger’s book about Hölderein and Rilk where he concluded that the misery of our time was the most extreme, because it was the misery that doesn’t see itself as misery. In other words, it is poverty that isn’t conscious of poverty. A theme that unites the work of the artists included in Exclusions and Censorship II years after its first iteration in Pamplona is the a political context that seems to enlarge the rift that Salcedo opened at the Tate Gallery. During the development of Exclusions and Censorship I, the United States undertook the extension of the wall that separates San Diego from Tijuana, the United States from Mexico. Today, almost 10 years later we read, we hear, and we see a story that keeps expanding across the map and over the experience of what is real.
Daniel Fernández-Cañadas