Autumn 2018 exhibitions

Tabakalera hosts two exhibitions this autumn. Both come from the curating residencies developed by Natasha Marie Llorens and Tractora Koop. E. at Tabakalera during 2017.

L’Intrus
October 26, 2018-February 3, 2019
Curator: Natasha Marie Llorens
Exhibition Hall 1

Artists: Ayman Alazraq and Emanuel Svedin, Nadia Barkate, Dages Juvelier Keates and Alexis Steeves, Anna Lopez Luna, Jumana Manna, Omar Mismar, Jon Otamendi, Shane Aslan Selzer and Chelsea Knight, Lara Tabet, Elizabeth Tubergen.

L’Intrus takes French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s eponymous essay as a point of departure. Nancy metaphorically renders the one who is intruding, the stranger, as a transplanted heart. Nancy’s body needs a stranger, but it is also always in danger of rejecting that stranger and, as a consequence, of dying. The implication of Nancy’s text is this: not only is the stranger already of the social body, the social body depends on their presence and on the fact of their difference. L’Intrus borrow this insight, and presents 13 international artists whose work represents the figure of the stranger as a relationship between the figure and its context.

Why think l’intrus as a relationship? Because it allows the viewer to see the stranger as something that is produced between the inside and the outside of a body, a nation, an ethnic group, etc., rather than “strangeness” as something that belongs to some people and not others.

Europe is in the middle of a migrant crisis that is testing the limits of its universalism along with its ability to see humanity in all human beings. The exhibition responds to this condition of crisis with pictures of the stranger—artwork in many different media—that assume the psychological and ideological interdependence of human beings, especially of those whose difference from “ourselves” interferes with our lives.

Linked to the exhibition, from December 17-21 there will be a Curatorial Intensive Programme, conducted by Natasha Marie Llorens and Lotte Arndt. Form more information, pgaraikideak [​at​] tabakalera.eu.

Landa Lan. A Documentation of Darcy Lange
December 1, 2018-March 10, 2019
Developed by Tractora Koop. E.
Exhibition Hall 2

Curiosity for the work of Darcy Lange (Aotearoa/New Zealand, 1946-2005) has led the artists that make up Tractora Koop. E. to present Landa Lan. A Documentation of Darcy Lange. Trained as a sculptor in Auckland and London, Darcy Lange began recording what he called work studies in 1972—durational video observations of people working in disparate contexts: from factories to farms, domestic environments to artist studios, and from New Zealand to the UK and Spain.

Landa Lan. A Documentation of Darcy Lange is the result of a group of artists working through documentation in order to understand another artist and his contexts. For this purpose, Darcy Lange’s personal archive travelled from New Plymouth to Donostia/San Sebastian in 2018. The exhibition is an articulation that traverses the work and life of Darcy Lange, and now that of Tractora as well. In the Basque language, landa lan means both field-work and to work the field. The exhibition and its surrounding activities draw from materials that share elements of displacement beyond the limits of the artist’s studio or workshop, the document status, and the experimental exercise.

With documents of: Darcy Lange, Tom Burrows, The Block,  Dan Graham, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Ibon Aranberri, Tom Johnson, Mary Kelly, Usue Arrieta & Vicente Vázquez, Ainara Elgoibar, Nader Koochaki and Ferrán Llagostera.

This exhibition has been made possible thanks to the generosity of the Darcy Lange Estate and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery.