april 2016

The Loan Application - Internal meeting

May 2016. Interinstitutional working group in Azala Espazioa and Artium, Basque Museum-Center for Contemporary Art

On the 5th and 6th of May, a working group will be convened to study and discuss the legal, ethical and social ramifications of exhibiting the polemical archaeological discovery from the Iruña-Veleia site in Basque Country in Artium, Basque Museum for Contemporary Art.

When these artefacts were denounced as a forgery, they became entangled in a legal process that has been ongoing since 2008. As a result, they have never been exhibited to the public, and are currently under custody of Bibat, the archaeological museum of Vitoria-Gasteiz. To display them in the museum for contemporary art requires a displacement of only 300 meters, but involves a radical change in discursive context.

Taking the hypothetical collaboration between the two museums as a starting point, the working group will discuss how the confrontation between artistic, scientific and political sensibilities may be oriented towards a narrative that overcomes the false-authentic binary, and how to involve the public in the institutional processes that determine the evolution of their own material culture.

Kaíros, Critical Contexts, Art and Writing

A seminar at the San Telmo Museum in Donostia San Sebastián, in the context of the exhibition 1966 | GAUR KONSTELAZIOAK | 2016.

We will present an essay on the relationship between history and writing, invoking "The Writing Lesson" by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss to revaluate the purpose of avant-garde manifestos such as that of the Basque Gaur Group.

BIdeOtik - Workshop and Screening

We have been invited to present our work in the "BIdeOtik Program. Responding to other audiovisual narratives.", organised by Azkuna Zentroa and Itxaso Díaz in Bilbao. The screenings will be preceded by a workshop at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Basque Country in the morning.

26 April 2016, 9:00 - 13:00 Workshop at the Fine Art Department of the Basque University

Recent works as well as fragments from films such as "Les Maîtres fous" by Jean Rouch will be taken as a point of departure to discuss the subversive potential of strategies of mimicry, falsification and reproduction.

26 April 2016, 19:00 Azkuna Zentroa, Alhóndiga Bilbao

Screening and discussion of two videos: "Work in Progress", in which the labourers from the rubber industry in Markina-Xemein are hired to reproduce hundreds of little modernist sculptures from Oteiza's "Chalk Laboratory"; and Últimas Palabras", in which an actor rehearses the final statement made by an ex-commander from the military junta in Argentina who has been condemned to a life sentence for crimes against humanity.