Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum

A tryptich on power relations, representation and the long shadow cast by history

Shadow Play is a three-channel video installation, and it is the artistic outcome of a two-year investigation into the copies of Diego Velázquez’s renowned painting The Surrender of Breda, and the semi-public spaces in which these copies can be found in the city. The point of departure for this project is the idea that the context determines the meaning of a work of art. While the original, housed in Madrid’s Prado Museum, celebrates the Spanish victory during the Siege of Breda, in the Stedelijk Museum Breda the painting’s portrayal of Dutch defeat is no obstacle to its role as a centrepiece in an exhibition celebrating the grandeur of the House of Oranje-Nassau. Meanwhile, in Breda's City Hall, the canvas serves daily as a backdrop for countless wedding photographs.

The video installation presents the various versions of the painting side by side, with a particular focus on the scenes that unfold around and in front of them. For instance, in the museum, conservators carefully hang Kees Maks’ 1903 canvas into place, while in the city hall, students from the St. Joost School of Art & Design stage a 1970s squatter protest in front of Fernando Coll’s 1931 copy. At the Prado, Dutch diplomats pose before the 1634 original, and at the military academy, military cadets stand to attention in front of André-Julien Prévost’s 1872 painting.

Artist Roel Meelkop composed a soundscape for the videos that accentuates or distorts the acoustics of the various filming locations, thereby emphasizing the distance between audience and the image.

Shadow Play blurs the lines between past and present, observer and observed, and invites new interpretations of Velázquez’s centuries-old tableau.

Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum present their project 'Alemanen kanposantue' for the first time in Portugal, at Galeria Presente, as part of the MostraEspanha2024 programme.

The installation revolves around the reconstruction of a monument dedicated to three Nazi soldiers killed in the Spanish Civil War. Its surface has been chipped and damaged by years of vandalism and the accumulation of layers of political graffiti. The sculpture reproduces this surface, treating it as a palimpsest of all the informal attempts to dismantle and appropriate the object loaded with ideology.

29/11/2024-28/02/2025, Galeria Presente
Rua Anselmo Braancamp 483, Porto, Portugal

Welcome to the fifth edition of the Groot Rotterdams Atelier Weekend (GRAW) on September 21 and 22, 2024!

Many years ago, we explored the ruins of an abandoned porcelain factory. Under a thick layer of soil, vines and weeds, we discovered the original plaster molds from which the tableware was cast. After carefully cleaning and drying the molds, we tried to put them back into production.

Would you like to see the results? Come and visit our studio in the weekend of September 21 and 22, at Ackersdijkstraat 20, in Rotterdam.

"Atlas of a Paper Empire" will be on display in the exhibition 1 SQUARE METER by the 004-collective, at Borgerstraat Studios 2-4 February 2024. This work was produced for the San Telmo ethnographic museum in Donostia-San Sebastian in 2022, and became part of its collection afterwards. It consists of a computer program that animates random trajectories through ultra-high definition digitized images of the museum's archive of antique maps, which are then projected onto a handbound volume filled with empty pages.