Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum

La Taller opens the cultural season with a new exhibition format. From 11 to 20 October 2018 we will be working alongside with Maite Martínez de Arenaza on a series of lithographs, based on the drawings of mountain landscapes we produced this summer while exploring historical military positions in the Basque Country. At the same time we will display a sculpture based on the reproduction of a Nazi monument dedicated to three German soldiers from the infamous Condor Legion, that had been standing neglected beside a road in the countryside for all these years.

How can the unofficial history of a forgotten slab of stone with the names of three Nazi soldiers help us rethink the role contemporary art practices can play in relation to contested heritage?

On the 14th of December we will present "400m" in PrintRoom, Rotterdam. The book provides artistic and sociological reflections on the relation between power and knowledge within the context of the controversy over an alleged forgery of Basque engravings in shards of Roman Era pottery.

It is a double presentation, with designer Richard Niessen who will present his book "The Palace of Typographic Masonry". We will start at 19:00. You are all invited!

"400m" was made thanks to Azala Kreazio Espazioa, Artium, Centro-Museo Vasco de Arte Contemporáneo, Jan van Eyck Academie, NEARCH, CBK Rotterdam and Eremuak.

How do we determine what is a treasure or rubbish, what counts as archaeology or “just a shard”? Do we need a thousand years to pass, or can we create an archaeology of our own times at this very moment? And who gets to decide about the meaning of objects? These are only some possible questions raised by Waste of Time, an exhibition in Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen. In the framework of the "plugin-program" of the German Schloß Ringenberg, the young curators Thorsten Schneider and Adelheid Smit have invited a number of artists to uncover hidden traces of time. Taking the archaeological collection of Museum het Valkhof as a starting point, the artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum, Matthias Schamp and Domas van Wijk playfully question common views on both old and contemporary objects and the value we attribute to them.