b-inspired Exhibitions
Nonument
La Capilla MACBA
Even a cursory understanding of our urban environment will acknowledge the multiple references to the past; its architecture, squares, monuments and even the street names provide the clues to the people and ideas that contributed to the society which inhabit that place. Who and what gets to be commemorated and how that commemoration is expressed depend on the political wind that happens to be blowing. Up until the 19th Century the artists who created these monuments did so in a way that went unchallenged following the established cannons of artistic practice, since Modernism undermined the tenets of art and our perception of art the nature and understanding of these monuments has been altered radically. The current exhibition Nonument taking place at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Plaça dels Àngels and which can be visited till February 2015, examines the idea of urban monument within the contemporary world.
MACBA invites 28 artists operating within the immediate context of Barcelona to reflect on the links between happening, aesthetic commemoration and the city and how a meaningful intervention can be made at a time of changes in society and artistic practices. The resulting exhibition consists of a series of specifically designed proposals in which different artistic vocabularies reinterpret the tradition of the monument and the articulation of the collective imagination. The exhibition has been curated by Josep Bohigas and Bartomeu Marí, “Monuments hide a certain collective appropriation of space, a sort of kidnapping of social memory, but is also seen in the difficulty for hosting them pluralities without stereotyping them, the desire to banish any doubts or uncertainty.”
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Antoni Arola, La Escalera 2014
Projection on scale model, 116 x 74 x 76 cm
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Terence Gower, Monumento brutal 2014
Model: 8 x 30 x 100 cm
In recent years different cities have come up with ingenious approaches to the problem of creating contemporary monuments, recently in London for example the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square involved selected temporary installations that could be described as the antithesis of tradition monument as we understand it. At an historical period when our conceptions of politics and national boundaries are so much in the news this exhibition undoubtedly takes on another more relevant dimension.
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Alicia Framis, Room for forgeting, 2014
60 x 60 x 25 cm
Four digital prints on forex
Nonument brings together artists from several generations and visual languages, who present their proposals in the form of drawings, models, publications, objects, texts, video and performance happenings. A series of interviews completes the exhibition with critical thinkers about the city as well as the role of art in today's urban environments.
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Daniela Ortiz, Protestation 2014
Documentation
The participating artists include; Antoni Arola, Itziar Barrio, David Bestué, Curro Claret, Raimond Chaves & Gilda Mantilla, Marcel Dalmau, Domènec, Alicia Framis, Antonio Gagliano, Àlex Giménez & Jorge Rodríguez Gerada, Terence Gower, Sílvia Gubern, Alicia Kopf, Marc Laré, Rogelio López Cuneca y Elo Vega, Antoni Llena, Miralda, Mariona Moncunelly y Sergio Botella, Muntadas, Daniela POrtiz, Víctor Pimstein, Sitesize, Francesc Torres.
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Marcel Dalmau, Ballot boxes in the Plaza de Armas 2014
Objects
- From 10 September to 08 February
- MACBA
- Placa dels Angels, 1 08001
- www.macba.cat
- From September 8th 2014 through February 8th 2015
- Exhibition organised by: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
- In collaboration woth the Conmemoración del Tricentenario de los hechos de 1714