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24008 León
Spain
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prensa@musac.es
MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, is pleased to announce its 2017 winter & spring exhibition programme, focused on the exploration of the hybrid field between writing and the visual arts through four group and solo exhibitions.
Babi Badalov. To Make Art to Take Clothes Off
February 18–June 4, 2017
To Make Art to Take Clothes Off is the first one-person show in Spain by the Azerbaijani artist Babi Badalov, a forced nomad and a political refugee based in France since 2011. In this site-specific project conceived for MUSAC’s Hall 3, the artist deploys his personal visual poetry in which he undertakes a poetic and political exploration of the contemporary world and of the ideologies that underlie the languages we use to think, describe and communicate it by means of language slips, neologisms, word plays and the relationship between linguistic and visual elements.
Badalov’s art practice is predicated on a constant exploration of the limits of language, with a special emphasis on the way in individuals are isolated from a collective when they do not speak its shared language. In this way, he addresses current socio-political issues that reflect his own experiences as a refugee.
Juan Cruz. Catalogue: It Will Seem a Dream
February 18–June 4, 2017
Juan Cruz’s oeuvre explores how translation—literally and metaphorically, culturally or linguistically, in texts or in objects—performs a central role in artistic practice, while at the same time undergirds the construction of personal and cultural identity.
The idea behind Catalogue: It Will Seem a Dream is to trace the artist’s evolution from the 1990s to date. For this purpose Cruz chooses a series of original texts related to some of his previous works, and publishes a book and shapes an exhibition with them, thereby generating a series of new relations that explain the works and the texts, opening them up to new and updated interpretations. As a result of the connections between works and between texts, the exhibition appears as a single installation rather than as a sum of works that unfold in space.
Constellations. Experimental Poetry in Spain (1963–2016)
January 21–June 4, 2017
Constellations. Experimental poetry in Spain (1963–2016) is an exhibition that addresses the presence and impact of visual and experimental poetry in Spain over the past 50 years. With 170 pieces of 96 artists, among which we can find from original works of visual and sound poetry, to book-objects, poem-objects, video-poems and poetic actions.
The show illustrates a number of areas which in the middle of the 20th century attracted a group of authors who distanced themselves from conventional forms, whose proposals were a renewal of the poetic language and a breach of the established limits, setting up a fascinating cosmos with multiple directions that extend up to the present in artistic creation.
Francisco Pino. Such a Nothing as Reality
January 21–May 7, 2017
Such a Nothing as Reality is an exhibition conceived to lend visibility to the pioneering work in the field of the visual arts by Francisco Pino (Valladolid, 1910–2002). More widely celebrated as an outstanding figure in 20th century Spanish poetry, Pino nevertheless also created a relatively unknown but highly innovative body of work across several disciplines in the 1960s and 70s. The show, curated by Alberto Santamaría, offers a better grasp of Francisco Pino’s import from a new perspective, based on over 250 pieces including manuscripts, embossed books, mail art, rubber stamps, painted stones, and so on.
