Gallery Façade. April 2024
"Camgun#72",Francis Alÿs
"Camgun#72",Francis Alÿs
"Camgun#72",Francis Alÿs; "Between Viznar and Alcafar", Willie Doherty
"Camgun#72",Francis Alÿs; "Between Viznar and Alcafar", Willie Doherty; "Balancín", Miralda
"Balancín", Miralda; "Over my dead body", Mona Hatoum
Exhibition view
Detail from "Nidec Csc 10", Dagoberto Rodríguez
Exhibition view
Exhibition view
"Cautivo", Rogelio López Cuenca
Exhibition view
"Crossing Surda", Emily Jacir
"Transportation tube", Miroslaw Balka
"He´s no terrorist (Airborne)" "I´m sorry (Airborne)", Dennis Adams
Exhibition view
"FEAR PANIC TERROR", Muntadas
"Comrade leader, comrade leader, how nice to see you II", Walid Raad
Detail from "Comrade leader, comrade leader, how nice to see you II", Walid Raad
Information
THE WORLD WE LIVE IN
Dennis Adams, Francis Alÿs, Miroslaw Balka, Willie Doherty, Mona Hatoum, Emily Jacir,
Rogelio Lopez Cuenca, Antoni Miralda, Antoni Muntadas, Walid Raad, Dagoberto Rodriguez.
What art can do
by Eleanor Heartney
George Orwell’s 1984 describes the system by which the ruling party diligently scrubs history clean of inconvenient and unwanted people and facts. In the novel, this takes place with what we now would describe as analog means – literally rewriting historical records and news articles, cutting up pictures, destroying texts. Today history is rewritten much more easily with a few key strokes. But the goal is much the same – the creation of a citizenry enthralled by the present moment and aware only of the present set of facts and images. One difference of course is that it is not simply government – Big Brother – which manipulates us. Equally or more influential are the corporate media barons, social media influencers, and our own personalized algorithms that ensure we only see information that conforms to our preconceptions.
The world we live in is entangled in a series of ever-escalating crises, among them wars, eco-disaster, death, and displacement, fading democracy and looming autocracy. The artists here survey the pileup of disasters over the last fifty years, and like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History try to sift through the wreckage. In a world of fake news, alternative facts, deep fakes and artificial intelligence, there are urgent questions about what is real, what is illusory and how we might tell the difference. One place to start is a careful analysis of the way we understand the data and information that overwhelms us every day. Another is to remind ourselves that even in a world of constructed reality, some things are real: real dead and mangled bodies, real leveled cities, real rubble, real blood. The artists here explore both these avenues.
Walid Raad comes closest to Orwell’s distopic vision of historical revisionism in works that use convincing but invented documentation to mingle real and fictitious histories. Comrade leader, comrade leader, how nice to see you, is from a series of works about the fictitious renaming of waterfalls in the middle east. Here, with tiny images of real-world leaders lined up beneath a giant waterfall, he satirizes attempts by the powerful to extend control even to the natural world.
Throughout his five-decade career, Muntadas has focused on the messages hidden in our communication technologies. In Fear Panic Terror he highlights the persistence of the eponymous terms in newspaper headlines and book covers. These help us understand how the media has been complicit in fomenting the emotions necessary for acceptance of such abstractions as the “war on terror” and in maintaining a constant state of personal, social, and political uncertainty.
With Over my dead body, Mona Hatoum also subverts a mass media format to take a stand against the militarist propaganda that often threatens to overwhelm us. In a poster reminiscent of a fashion advertisement the artist stares fearlessly at a little soldier climbing her nose, thus presenting a humorous but firm message of refusal.
Miralda’s Balancín is equally subversive. This work, part of a series from the 1970s, is a reaction to his own mandatory military service, covers a rocking chair with tiny plastic toy soldiers. The contrast between the placidity suggested by the chair and the celebration of militarism embedded in the toys is a reminder of the ease with which so-called “armchair warriors” can ignore the real human cost of war.
Dagoberto Rodríguez extends this idea of the infiltration of militaristic ideals into non-combatant society with NIDEC CSC10. This row of gleaming cast aluminum police helmets strung together like beads on a string attest to the indistinguishability of the paraphernalia of war and civilian control.
Rogelio Lopez Cuenca digs into the overlap between the languages of photojournalism, news, advertising, entertainment, and art as they are used to shape our perceptions of history and current events. The violence at the center of Goya’s The Third of May 1808, melds with the atrocities of current counter-terrorist actions in Cuenca’s After Goya, while in his Cautivo, an image depicting the mass evacuation of the civilian population of Málaga in 1937 is removed from context and becomes merely another fragment of fading memory.
With Between Viznar and Alfacar, Willie Doherty memorializes the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca who was executed for his Republican views in 1936 and thrown along with other rebels into an unmarked grave somewhere on the road to Granada. Doherty, who has frequently focused on contested territories in his native Northern Ireland, has retraced this route in melancholy photographs that depict a stark landscape haunted by both memory and forgetfulness.
Dennis Adams also considers the fragility of memory in a series of works created in the aftermath of the attacks of 911. Here a newspaper bearing the banner headline HE’S NO TERRORIST is carried off by the wind. As Adams notes, “What I came away with after September 11 was the realization that the more catastrophic the event, the more ephemeral the signs capable of speaking to it.” Viewed twenty years on, this work suggests how the not-so-distant past feels separated from us by an unbridgeable gulf.
As Adams work reminds us, in a digital world, traditional means of communication like newspapers are rapidly becoming obsolete. There is something a bit melancholy about the process by which once vital tools and technologies are transformed into relics. This sense is captured by Miroslaw Balka’s Transportation Tube, which references the kind of technology once vital to the movement of things like packages and paperwork which now feels like a museum piece.
Francis Alys homes in a different form of once ubiquitous technology. With Camgun #72 he focuses on the camera as a key instrument in our perception of reality. Here it literally becomes a weapon as vintage film canisters and reels are repurposed with bits of found wood and metal to become a gun. The work raises the question: How often is the camera a tool of violence and destruction when it selectively presents distorted versions of events?
By contrast, in Emily Jacir’s Crossing Surda, the camera becomes an instrument of truth. She surreptitiously documents the fraught process that Palestinians must go through to pass through Israeli checkpoints. In the process, she highlights the arbitrary and yet very dangerous nature of borders. She urges us to ask – what are these divisions that create separations and encourage us to destroy each other?
This work, like all the works in this exhibition, raises questions about what is real and what is not, how we come by our beliefs and understandings of the world, and how they cause us to act. In 1984, the Party’s slogan is “Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” What can art do? One answer: take back control, expose the discrepancies, shine a light on the manipulation, fracture the illusion, and refuse the Soma.