Itziar Okariz’s practice is predicated on the confluence of actions and devices that expand the territory of performance and alter signs by means of a series of repetitions and differences that range from the body to the voice, as well as interferences in the public space and variations in language.
In June 1975, 42 years ago, Allan Kaprow staged the Com-fort Zones Activity (word used by Kaprow for his performing actons) at Galería Vandrés in Madrid. The Activity consisted in eight rules or protocols for couples, at a time when demonstrations of intimacy were checked by the authoritarian regime then in place.
Since museums first came into existence back in the eighteenth century, there has been a tradition of exhibiting that consists in showing sculptures in central courtyards and lobbies, allowing various fragments from the history of art to coexist in the same space, as part of a stage setting designed to be viewed by a comparative gaze.
Obituary is a live monologue performed by the artist which falls apart and eats itself.
Combining characters and motifs from past work, the performance acts as a parody of Plato’s cave and an expansion of the language found in Matt Copson’s animation and installation work.
This is his first fully-fledged performance with live soundtrack by long-time collaborator felicita.
MATT COPSON
Matt Copson was born in 1992 in Oxford, England. His work uses theatrical devices and artistic tropes to create existential dramas of contemporaneity, abstraction, eternal recurrence and the uncanny.
His shown exhibitions and projects at CLEARING (Brussels) Swiss Institute (New York), Louis Vuitton Foundation (Paris), Mönchehaus Museum (Goslar) and Serpentine Sackler Gallery (London). In 2022, he will premiere ‘Last Days’, his first opera as a librettist and director, at the Royal Opera House, London.
As part of the exhibition Myriad Reflector, which will be activated through a programme of nocturnal flashes of different rhythms and intensities, the artist Matt Copson will perform a performance entitled Obituary.
Matt Copson. Courtesy of the artist.
To celebrate International Museum Day, CA2M has come up with a new way of activating its collection and making it more widely accessible.
“ASSOCIATED MAKING. ASSEMBLY KIT OF PIECES FROM THE CA2M COLLECTION” is a curatorial programme by Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo that views the exhibition as an open, imaginative and surprising reflection in which artists, institutions and audiences can collectively rethink our contemporaneity.
Mitsuo Miura arrived to Barcelona from Japan in 1966 with a suitcase in either hand and just a bare few words of Spanish. Armed with his oriental tempo, he sat down on a bench in Plaza de Cataluña to watch how this city by the sea passed by. Ever since, the young Japanese artist never stopped observing each and every one of the landscapes in which his personal life experiences have been played out. And so we could view his exhibitions as invitations to contemplation and displacement, almost always related with wellbeing, memory and pleasure.
Can moving arms, legs, hair be inspiring for a movement, a coming uprising for more joyful and equal ways of living together? Engaged with the precarious moment of taking the stage—a moment which allows for one’s visibility while at the same time disclosing one’s fragility—Portrait of a Movement addresses questions of pleasure, power, and radical difference. Two large film installations form the core of the exhibition: while engaging with dance movements and artistic collaborations, they explore abstraction’s potential for resistance in the face of reactionary politics.
There is a signature feature to Hannah Collins’s photos of urban horizons: the sky is always tinted with a strange colour. Like the images over the credits of an imaginary film, this photo captures the feeling that a particular place—whether through premeditated cultural references or a subjective impression—produced in the artist at a certain point in time.
Malicious Mischief is the result of exhaustive research into the artist’s life’s work with a view to expanding its narrative and recognition among European audiences, spanning from his early creations on the East coast to his work in the late-90s before he died from AIDS-related illness.
Myriad Reflector is an exhibition exercise into the nocturnality. Conceived as a multilayered score unfolding through time, the contributions of artists —composed by light, sonic, rhythmic, smell, haptic, and choreographic elements— intermingle in a kaleidoscopic display defined by disorientation, refractive perspectives, and sensual textures.