Saturday, 3 May, 2014 - 13:12
Max Andrews from Latitudes interviews us for the Frieze Magazine, about recent projects such as "Work in progress" and "Producing time in between other things".
"We have a long-standing interest in the image of ‘work’, and in the relation between art and labour. So we took this scene as the starting point for a cinematic analysis of production processes, both in these semi-clandestine workshops as well as in the main factory itself. Our approach has been strictly dispassionate, free from any superficial attempt to give the workers a voice. Instead, we focused our camera on the disciplinary conditions and rationalization of these processes, reproducing them in the montage by breaking up complex scenes into smaller units and stitching them back together again."
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Monday, 24 March, 2014 - 10:51
Introspection is a chronic pathological condition of the Occupy movement. Everyone is constantly preoccupied with how much of their past to give up in return for a future that hasn’t arrived yet. What if we fail? Or worse, what if we’re successful? What if we do manage to change the world? What will it look like? Will it still need us? We share the restless anxiety of the revolutionary who knows one must become obsolete in order for the revolution to succeed.
Open! has published Keeping the Peace, our text on our experiences in Occupy Amsterdam. Read the complete essay here. Open! is an Amsterdam-based publication platform that fosters and disseminates experimental knowledge on art, culture and the public domain. It works with theorists, artists and designers who contribute to the creation of an experimental and critical body of thought.
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Monday, 24 March, 2014 - 10:04
Work in Progress (2013) immerses itself in the manufacturing industry of Markina-Xemein, the rural Basque village where Jaio comes from. A video documents the mass-production of rubber car parts, following the pieces from the assembly line in a worker-owned factory to subcontracted workshops where informal workers finish them by hand. Several of these workers are employed by the artists to cast hundreds of replicas of small modernist sculptures. These are displayed on mass-produced shelving to evoke the "Chalk Laboratory" of Basque sculptor Jorge Oteiza, a fierce critic of the commodification of art.
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Thursday, 13 February, 2014 - 13:28
Solo exhibition, curated by Latitudes, at ADN Platform, Sant Cugat del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain, 25 January–30 April 2014
The Margins of the Factory presents two recent projects by the Rotterdam-based duo Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum that are motivated by their interest in art's relationship with labour. Each explores sculptural form and manufacturing processes from the perspective of artists who have not usually made objects. Jaio & van Gorkum undertake what are in part sociological investigations by documenting the local, marginal effects of the displacement of manufacturing industries over the last two generations with the emergence of the global market. Emerging from the artists' personal history and implicating the direct effects of their own vocation as well as work they ask of others, the projects are moreover complicit in asking what kind of industriousness brings value and what political life objects might have.
The exhibition opening features a performance by British “avant-folk” musician Nathaniel Robin Mann, developed in collaboration with Jaio & van Gorkum around the raw footage of Work in Progress and the tradition of work song.
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Tuesday, 4 February, 2014 - 09:48
For the opening of the exhibition "The Margins of the Factory" at ADN Platform, Nathaniel Mann performed his rendition of the famous traditional Basque song "Oi Pello Pello". Nathan sings it to raw footage from "Work in Progress", showing men and women at work in the Lea Artibai region in Basque Country, where they trim rubber parts destined for the global automobile industry. While singing, he manually assembles a device which broadcasts his prerecorded voice to a transistor radio, with which he then performs a breathtaking duet.
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Thursday, 16 January, 2014 - 13:58
Jaime Cuenca wrote about "Work in progress" and "Producing time in between other things" for the catalog, published by Sala Rekalde, that came out on occasion of our solo exhibition curated by Alex Baurés at FRAC Aquitaine.
A veiled reference to the language of the ready-made shines through here, which is subverted at the same time that it is being cited. The ultimate goal is not the artistic appropriation of objects by removing them from their context of production, but precisely the exhibition of such a context, of the processes that bring it to life, and of the contradictions that traverse it. Extracting the diverse forms of production from the fabric of life in which they are practiced and displaying them side by side, in the most dispassionate way, they themselves reveal the relations that link and oppose them. Artistic activity operates here at the margins of the amateur work of Jos van Gorkum and the piecework carried out by the women of Markina – both, in turn, at the margin of the factory – and in doing so questions its own form of production.
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Sunday, 12 January, 2014 - 00:00
Tiempo Muerto, a three-screen installation about the Barakaldo Zombiewalk is being included in the exhibition: The tactics of the adversary
October 28 to January 30 in NORMAL Espazo cultural intervention , Universidade da Coruña
The exhibition has been extended to 15 Februari 2014.
Curator and production: MANUEL SEGADE
Participating artists: Mohamed Bourouissa, Cyprien Gaillard, Núria Güell, Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum, Jennie Livingston, Carme Nogueira, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Mladen Stilinovic
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Friday, 13 December, 2013 - 20:14
Frac Aquitaine presents a solo exhibition of Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum. The artists have been invited by curator Alexandra Baurès to pursue their reflection on notions of work and the production of art within conditions marked by globalisation
3 October 2013 - 21 December 2013
Vernissage Thursday 3 October 2013, 18h30
Artist talk between Alexandra Baurès, curator of the exhibition and the artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum: Thursday 3 October 2013, 17h30-18h30
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Tuesday, 9 July, 2013 - 02:38
In "Últimas Palabras" (Last Words), an actor and a speech instructor rehearse a text based on the final statement made by Alfredo Astiz at his trial. This ex-commander of the Navy during the last military dictatorship in Argentina is currently serving a life sentence for crimes against human nature.
Also known as the "Blond Angel of Death", Astiz was notorious for his chameleon-like ability to shift character, passing himself off as a victim of repression in order to infiltrate human rights organisations as a spy.
This re-enactment of his last words is a study of the relationship between the political art of oratory and that which Hannah Arendt has called "the banality of evil".
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