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Cycle of talks featuring artists involved in the '(Un)common Values' exhibition
As a side event for the (Un)common Values exhibition, which brings together a selection of works from the contemporary art collections of the National Bank of Belgium (NBB) and the Banco de España at the venue run by the former at its headquarters in Brussels, a cycle of talks is being organised with some of the participating artists. Moderated by Zoë Gray, curator of the Wiels Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels, these talks focus on the three main lines of the exhibition: Matters of Exchange, I Contain Multitudes and Paix/Prix. Anyone can reserve a place to take part in them on site (at the exhibition venue, where the dates of the talks are marked by presentations of the performance piece All About You by Olivia Hernaïz) or online, via the NBB website.
View of the venue for the exhibition (Un)common Values, featuring works by Ria Verhaeghe & Aleix Plademunt
The first talk took place on 2 June, and featured Ria Verhaeghe (b. Roeselare, West-Vlaanderen, Belgium, 1950) and Aleix Plademunt (b. Girona, Spain, 1980). Verhaeghe is the creator of Provisoria, an extensive, multi-faceted archive after the fashion of Atlas Mnemosyne by Aby Warburg, on which she has been working for over 30 years. She compiles press photos and links them together using various artistic devices (collages, installations, videos, etc.) in an effort to find common gestures and universal memories that help us to go beyond the fiction of individuality and see the world with more empathy. Aleix Plademunt won the Emerging Artist award at PHotoEspaña in 2015. His works take a critical look at the links between culture and nature, and more specifically at the sometimes devastating effects of human intervention on the land. A case in point is his series of photos Matter (2013-2022), which belong to the Banco de España Collection. Carlos Martín writes that they suggest 'a narrative journey that runs from a return to the most pristine (matter) to the clearest political and social implications of its transformation and use'.
Ria Pacquée | Daniel García Andújar: Period_Fake (2020)
Ria Pacquée (b. Merksem, Belgium, 1954) and Daniel García Andújar (b. Almoradí, Alicante, Spain, 1966) will be the artists featured in the second talk on Thursday 7 July. Since the late 1970s, Pacquée has been using her own body as a tool in a complex artistic exploration and action process concerning the notion of identity. Through performative art involving her characters "Madame" and "It", she highlights the constructed, open, ever-changing nature of identity, anticipating debates that have taken centre stage in recent years with the emergence of queer theory.
Processes also play a major role in the output of Daniel García Andújar, whose hybrid works are markedly critical in nature and invite reflection on the conditions in which images are produced, distributed and accumulated in today's world. (Un)common Values features one of his most recent pieces –Period_Fake (2020)– in which he looks in depth at paper money as a form of art. He focuses on forgery as a derivative form that has been common throughout history, and on its links to recurrent debates in contemporary art concerning the issue of originals and copies and authenticity as a symbolic construct. This genealogical exploration also provides food for thought as to the implications of the radical changes in forms of payment and financial transfers as a result of the digital revolution. As García Andújar states, those changes mean that hackers can now be seen as 'new, modern artists and today's forgers'.
Bleda & Rosa: Compendium. Notes on War and Revolution I Trafalgar (2011-2013) | Wendy Morris: Discipline is the Ultimate Happiness (2017)
The third and last talk will take place on 25 August and will feature Wendy Morris (b. Walvis Bay, Namibia, 1960) and Bleda & Rosa, the joint working name of artists María Bleda (b. Castellón, Spain, 1969) and José María Rosa (Albacete, Spain, 1970). Morris takes a multi-disciplinary approach that often involves collaborative working methods to explore the history of colonialism and its legacy in the present, showing how its symbolic order continues to be reproduced through inertia and a logic that is not always easy to identify. (Un)common Values includes charcoal drawings that she produces for her stop-motion animated films. In these films she mixes and interweaves the personal and the collective, the documentary and the narrative, the fictional and the historical.
The duo Bleda & Rosa have been active since the mid 1990s, and have produced a fascinating number of works described by Álvaro de los Ángeles as having 'the link between image and text as one of the keys to their balance'. Their photos are arranged into series as a result of long processes of exploration and field work. They speak to us of the memories contained in certain spaces and landscapes, and establish a critical dialogue between those memories and the present. The surgical and the poetic merge in an output of conceptual complexity and metaphorical density that has earned them the National Award for Photography. The pieces on show in (Un)common Values are Compendium. Notes on War and Revolution I. Trafalgar (2011-2013) and Compendium. Notes on War and Revolution VIII. Cadiz (2012), two series of photos that show spaces associated with two historical events (the Battle of Trafalgar and the approval of the Constitution of Cadiz) in the early 19th century, in which the written word plays a fundamental role.