Gallery facade. March 2017.
Manu Uranga. Exhibition view.
Manu Uranga. Barandilla. 2017. 140 x 140 x 10 cm. Iron railing.
Manu Uranga. Exhibition view.
Manu Uranga. Exhibition view.
Manu Uranga. Deshidratada cero. 2017. 97 x 88 x 25 cm. Various steam dehydrated materials and polyester resin.
David Martínez Suárez. Exhibition view.
David Martínez Suárez. Cierva. 2017. 140 x 35 x 23 cm. Steel base, printed image and ceramic hind.
David Martínez Suárez. Columna. 2017. 42 x 20 x 20 cm. Concrete, resin and glass.
David Martínez Suárez. Vasar. 2017. 110 x 38 x 38 cm. Wood, glass and framed picture.
David Martínez Suárez. Cabeza de ciervo. 2016. 50 x 130 x 46 cm. Stainless steel and deer antlers.
David Martínez Suárez. Reposo. 2016. 40 x 25 x 28 cm. Stainless steel and glass.
Lorea Alfaro & Jon Otamendi. Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Exhibition view.
Information
FONDO ANIMAL
Lorea Alfaro, David Martínez Suárez, Jon Otamendi y Manu Uranga
From March 25th until May 20th, 2017
It is a strategy of those who write to begin by commenting on the difficulty they feel when writing a text that resists. More than a strategy, it is a tactic to start somewhere. Strategy is a cause; the tactic, a consequence. Recognize this difficulty as a first anchor for a support that does not yet exist. The text is a process of resistance of the word. Or the confirmation of a latent failure: that of language in relation to what one wants to talk about. Even more so if the text refers to something that we quickly summarize as art, where it is understood that the language is another. Or where the language would have to be another. Not the word. Although this appears continuously and giving rise to multiple suspicions, especially when some (those of us who are not artists) write about others (who are artists). Or when discourse is imposed on practices, prevailing over them. The feeling of failure of the text in art, at least in my case, derives from this double mistrust of the word. One is your own, the other is foreign.
It is not the first time that David, Manu, Lorea and Jon work together. In fact, this exhibition that they have decided to call Animal Fund stems from a previous situation that also serves as my first anchor point when it comes to approaching their work individually. It is about MLDJ, a common project that the four of them launched between April 2010 and May 2011 in Bilbao. As they themselves tell in HAZ, a publication that acts as a document for what cannot be documented -experience-, MLDJ was born with the intention of activating a situation in which artistic production starts with the artists themselves, managing and assuming all the phases of
Project Organization. The collective exhibition as an instrument and not as an end in itself. The project as a meeting place for different participants in an artistic context. Without the need for a common theme, just the practice itself. The theme seems to have become the great dogma of the curatorship, frequently turning the works into footnotes of a room text. Collaborative action over collective identity. MLDJ was a project that was not intended to be an apology for the collective of the process or the creation of an identity, which always carries the danger of the brand. For them, both the creative process and perception are individual. The moral superiority of the collective with respect to the individual has always bothered me, although I understand the individual as the sum of many others at the same point that cannot always or need to be named. How I am also bothered by the fact that a certain celebration of the collective tends to prioritize both the process and the method that it gets to ignore its material and formal effects. Of the importance of the result. That the process has a purpose, although this is a tool for the first. Although I have long thought about how art activates non-explicit or actively conscious forms of collectivity. Either through common interests between people who do not know each other, or through the (artistic) object as a system of relationships that do not share the same time or the same space.