The Object and its Place (2012) consists of eight photographs from a larger series featured in the solo show by Madrid-based Álvaro Perdices at the Casa sin fin Gallery in Madrid in 2012. Each photograph must be taken as a self-appropriation of earlier works that the artist sees as a re-reading, re-contextualisation and re-meaning. The series questions the ability of photographs to faithfully record a fact — an essential function not only of documentary photography, but also of how photography was used to record the conceptual art of the 1970s — by detaching it from its original place and function, so that its ‘other’ significant potential gaining nuances.

On the other hand, the series can almost be considered as Perdices’s Boîte-en-valise as it combines works from previous projects in a retrospective that is hardly recognisable: it questions the very exhibit format that looks at the past without naming it, something that contemporary authors such as Isidoro Valcárcel Medina have put into practice. The images are taken from Zabana, Inshallah (2009-2011), a project in which he analysed the colonist discourse of Oran Archaeological Museum and, witnessing its dismantling, cited one of the first statements expressing disagreement  with academic art training: Le Manifeste du réalisme, by Gustave Courbet. On the other hand, NEGATED, OpeN and nakeD, an intervention at the  Castellón Contemporary Art Space in which he turned around the established uses of the centre’s spaces  (using the offices as an exhibition area and vice versa) contains a nod to the intervention of Hans Haacke at the Boijmans Museum in 1996: he intervened architecturally on the building by considering the idea of a hole or crack, a paradoxically very full emptiness that had been explored in the past and which now was “stuffed” with the special poetry of the absurd. The Object and its Place likewise brings together images form his work in the storehouses of the National Museum of Natural Sciences of Madrid, returning to his first major work, Black Photos, produced between 1996 and 1997. In that work, Perdices photographed dark rooms in Los Angeles, New York and Madrid, generating a multiple dislocation of the object by questioning its conventional meaning.

Isabel Tejeda