gina pane: intersections / Lucy’s Iris. Contemporary African Women Artists / Pamen Pereira: The Stone Woman Gets Up to Dance

MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (León, Spain) presents three new shows between the months of January and April 2016. gina pane, intersections explores different strands of gina pane’s artistic practice: individual responsibility towards nature and its degradation; the impact of social, economic and political conditions in the world (and also in art); the body as a field for exploration and as a symbol of fragility and pain; emotional relationships with others and particularly with women; and a fascination with the sacred. Lucy’s Iris. Contemporary African Women Artists aims to expand our knowledge and our vision of contemporary African creation by women through an extensive exhibition curated by Orlando Britto Jinorio, two film series organized by Beatriz Leal and Guadalupe Arensburg, and a cycle of conferences led by Sabrina Amrani and Orlando Britto Jinorio. Last but not least, The Stone Woman Gets Up to Dance  gathers a selection of works by Spanish artist Pamen Pereira from the 1990s to the present and portrays her facet of artist-alchemist, as is manifested in her use and manipulation of different materials and media.

gina pane, intersections
Curator: Juan Vicente Aliaga

gina pane (Biarritz, France 1939–Paris, 1990) earned a place in the history of contemporary art thanks to her actions focused on the production of wounds. Her works with the body were nonetheless the result of a well-prepared and meditated project. The artist addressed the body in performance both as a biological and psychological ground base as well as a social body. With her actions, the artist endeavoured to open up to others—to the “other”—and to get closer to different human realities such as identity, pain, and language through her own experiences, in what was a clearly holistic and intersectional conception. As such, one can claim that the fragile and mortal body pane spoke of was also engaged with nature, and indeed in her works from the late sixties the French-Italian artist also dealt with the threats to nature.

The works chosen to outline the various strands of pane’s work in this exhibition are underwritten by different techniques (painting, photographic panels composed of drawings and text, video, sculpture) which echo the artist’s broad-ranging artistic restlessness, underpinned by a holistic vision of creativity. The most frequent reading of gina pane depicts her almost exclusively as an artist whose performances involved an element of personal risk. Yet this is not the optic taken here, instead proposing a more overarching view of her whole practice in which differing problematics intersect in pursuit of a language replete with signs and symbols.

Lucy’s Iris. Contemporary African Women Artists

Artists: Jane Alexander (South Africa, 1959), Berry Bickle (Zimbawe, 1959), Zoulikha Bouabdellah (Russia/Algeria, 1977), Loulou Cherinet (Sweden/Ethiopia, 1970), Safaa Erruas (Morocco, 1976), Pélagie Gbaguidi (Senegal, 1965), Amal Kenawy (Egypt, 1974–2012), Kapwani Kiwanga (Canada, 1978), Nicène Kossentini (Tunisia, 1976), Mwangi Hutter (Kenya/Germany, 1975), Fatima Mazmouz (Morocco, 1974), Julie Mehretu (Ethiopia, 1970), Myriam Mihindou (Gabon, 1964), Aida Muluneh (Ethiopia, 1974), Wangechi Mutu (Kenya, 1972), Otobong Nkanga (Nigeria, 1974), Tracey Rose (South Africa, 1974), Berni Searle (South Africa, 1974), Sue Williamson (United Kingdom/South Africa, 1974), Billie Zangewa (Malawi, 1973), Amina Zoubir (Algeria, 1983)
Curator: Orlando Britto Jinorio

These days, from a postcolonial perspective, we are witnessing the appearance of a series of enunciative territories explored by a diversity of proposals that undermine conventional forms of hegemony and of a series of representational spaces that do not respond to imposed dichotomous categories such as I/other or hegemony/subalternity. As a result, places that re-articulate new “maps”—new locations and epistemologies contributing to the removal of the categories that relegated some cultures to the marginal space of that denied by the so-called “superior” modern Western forms—are taking hold. It is in this spirit that the project Lucy’s Iris, which includes an extensive exhibition curated by Orlando Britto Jinorio, two film series organized by Beatriz Leal and Guadalupe Arensburg, and a cycle of conferences led by Sabrina Amrani and Orlando Britto Jinorio, comes about. This project aims to expand our knowledge and our vision, hence the use of the metaphor of the ancestor of the genus Homo’s—called Lucy—iris.

Lucy’s Iris tries to explore and show different spheres of African contemporary creation through the selection of works and proposals of a score of creators who both live and create in Africa and in the diaspora. Through their diversity, we can understand complex and varied facets of that different cultural space—Africa. All of these creators play an active role in the current artistic and cultural scene, both in Africa and in the international arena, understanding the latter in its most universal sense.

Pamen Pereira. The Stone Woman Gets Up to Dance
Curator: Kristine Guzman

The work of Pamen Pereira (Ferrol, Spain, 1963) encompasses drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and occasionally photography or video, or any other media or material that may be useful in the creative act. Her creative process, generally united with vital experience, is closely linked to nature, from which she draws a great part of her images.

The exhibition The Stone Woman Gets Up to Dance gathers a selection of works by Pamen Pereira from the 1990s to the present and portrays her facet of artist-alchemist, as is manifested in her use and manipulation of different materials and media. After practicing Zen meditation for many years, Pamen Pereira searches for unity between mind and spirit, and she finds it in the communion of nature with imagination and the creative process. Earth, air, water, and fire become poetic objects inspired by sturm und drang (storm and stress) and the opposite poles of lightness and gravity, heaven and earth, light and darkness, in an introspective gaze to the “mirror” of the Hokyo zan mai (Precious Mirror Samadhi), whose extract is the title of the exhibition.