VIDEOsPAIN

MADATAC aims to take the pulse on what is new in the international ever-changing environment and on each edition put forward an attention-grabbing and inspirational theme.

This special selection for HONG-GAH MUSEUM presents a caustic, peculiar, critical and enticing view to video art projects produced by Spanish audio visual artists, where oneiric and verity visions, oriented by animated grids, plateaus or intangible signs, collide with intenseorganic textures and are expanded towards heterogeneous ways of watching unveiled body landscapes and forgotten emotions.

On the other hand, the video pieces open as well the Pandora’s box of cybernetic culture, that enables radical new processes to storm the audiovisual creation, with the ambition to conquer and subdue the screen with groundbreaking pixels and a re-assimilation of the relationship between art, matter and technology.

VIDEOsPAIN is a video art exhibition presenting an extensive collection of thought-provoking perspectives and visually arresting video art works from contemporary Spanish artists who go beyond an assumed reality and a coveted virtuality. The works that are grouped around this topic display the dilemmas of fragmented societies, that are undergoing a transition towards new models not signposted. In this way, the objective is to present an audio-visual selection to recognize the changing territories, urban, wild or unreal, on which we move, create and exist.

With this pivotal status of absence-presence, the artists built a kind of memory of a time without anchors, that ensures continuity, frames of reference, guides to where transit and where to strengthen the invisible directions of an art (and civilization) based on technology that allows to address a complex spatiality, trying to imbibe information as creation, as done when exploring an unknown landscape or the objects deriving from an uncharted culture.

In some way, this collaboration between MADATAC and Hong-Gah Museum is an opportunity to establish a dialogue between both Spanish and Taiwanese cultures and societies.

Spain and Taiwan: a peninsula and a island who wish to circumvent the distance that separates them by the seas, by connecting their “Qi” life energy, an active principle forming part of any living thing. This flow of electromagnetic energy form a Microcosmic Orbit circuit between the Spanish video art works that will be exhibited and the Taiwanese public that will assimilate them. Spain is an ancient society which tries to impose herself on the evolution of the times with variants of modernity. Taiwan is a young society applied to new technologies but with a millenarian culture behind. Both countries share a common passion to discover unknown territorialities in the limits of their domains. Spain from its last colonial expansion and Taiwan with its current spirituality, dynamism and presence in international markets. Also unites them a brief historical past, of which perhaps only the name of Formosa stays, as well as a dependency on systems of control which civil society, and artists, try to debug and purify by means of interconnections.

The video art installation you will attend, allude to this flow of transformation from the real to the virtual and vice versa, a way of catching the past so that the present has the complex variety of an Orchid, a polyhedral, mutant and exotic flower, valued and cultivated by the Taiwanese, as well as by the Spaniards, whose imperceptible metamorphosis to the human perception is comparable to the selected works for this exhibition, in which nothing ever remains invariable, everything changes and varies, to reset, readjust and renew the awareness and imagination of the spectator-observer.

A materialised introspection, bringing together various fragments of leftover thoughts: postcards of everyday life, casual sketches and fictional recreations of dreams. All of these make up an internal cosmology through which interaction is established between the person and their surroundings. An inner travel through several thoughts. This piece is a collage of several elements from the everyday life, mixed with others invented, drawings, photographs, new and discarded ideas… looking to response the question about identity. All these rejections of thoughts generate new visions and appearances forming a casual cosmology. It is an introspection of feelings projected in a symbolic space, where the presence of the person is projected into the environment and the objects.

From an artistic metaphor, Cyberbird proposes a reflection on metamorphosis and processes of transformation as elements that are essential in order to readapt to an ever-changing environment. Through a mutant mechanical-organic character, a virtual journey is begun; the main character is used as a vehicle to travel through different situations, in different eras, within the map of Europe. It is a stop-motion piece, using an articulated sculpture, inserted within a practically deserted, apocalyptic environment which, along with the sound, amplifies history’s disturbing message. The line of investigation following this project, focuses on the theme of metamorphosis, mutation and transformation processes. The projects are built from different media, to obtain the maximum possible perspectives. The starting point is focused on the idea of an “alternative nature”, where “impossible creatures”, activate stories full of symbolism and readings. The interest for those characters that inhabit between the real and the fantastic, it becomes thread to develop the content of the work, which mixes personal events and fiction in each of the stories.

A violinist desperately plays against her own existence. The effort, the overcoming and the struggle, are the only guide to reach her dreams. The attempt to achieve perfection leaves stigmas on her body. However, nothing seems to matter when the objective caresses complete freedom, without any ties.

1st part_Process of travelling in a landscape conditioned by the projection of the Cartesian geometry in the place where it is transformed into concentric: a reconstruction of the fractioned memory of the tour. Piece filmed in the Antarctica.

Today, everybody is permanently connected. All this makes us come across unexpected mutations of the individual, and we end up facing bizarre deformations that refer to the search of the identity. The subject-matter of the series relapses into the reflection about adaptation speed to which the personality is submitted in our epoch. The bombing of constant transformations in the models of interaction and social communication, which is given by the commercialization of the scientific and technological advances, turns the evolution process (Darwinian) into a grotesque distortion of the personality. We are before unexpected mutations, since the human being does not manage to integrate completely all these new advances.

“The Factory (42764203)” is a project that refers to video art and experimental film, streams that have their origins in the 60s. A long take sequence that shows a creative space like the Silver Factory in New York, founded in 1963 and now 50 years old, where Andy Warhol began to make their first films in which he showed facts of everyday life (sleeping, eating, cutting hair, drinking). Bezeta’s audio-visual work is simple and direct. His videos approach topics from his all day-life, little tells about his personal reflections, his walks, his daily routine, little poetic dissertation about quite simple topics. All this with a very personal optic, whose visual approximation surprises for his freshness and unpredictability. There is almost not separation between work and life. Although the simplicity of his works, is clear his interest in searching the experimentation in the images and the topics, trying to overwork each new work. The work intention, between video-art and cinema, is telling stories with many layers in them, more complex than they can seem.

Leonardo´s Vitruvian Man, paradigm of the universal man, has turned into an eight-limbed monster upon adopting the two postures drawn by Da Vinci: it now breaks free from the trap of perfection by which it was bound.

Museums are running out of space. There is a strong and self-perpetuating tendency that seeks to turn museums into brands within the dynamic international cultural industry. This bolsters the absurd role of ‘container’ that museums continue to self-assign today. Museums should be sprinklers that soak everything around them; otherwise they could become spectacular entities propelled into nothingness.

Labyrinth City deals with a virtual world which envelops us within nearby spaces: the close-up, partial and fragmentary view that characterises a stroll down the street. The City is the medium where daily life develops. It is the expression of collective creation. In this space the permanent structures of power and planned urbanism coexist with a permanent moving multitude navigating the streets. This population wandering across fluxes and intersections, their encounters and occupations, make the city complex and emergent. This city is produced from a set of images. The dataset (paradigm) is constituted by pictures taken in different cities- showing the physical structures of a city. These textures will shape the walls we will encounter in our path that construct the city. This database is spatialized – giving born to the urban space- by means of a structure (sintagma) that links the images.

The Spiritual Machine is a single-channel video composed by three screens presented as a triptych, where each one of them represents a different section, part or category of human being. That is, from left to right : Thought , Emotion and Matter. The three categories are represented by images from a woman (her face,her body) and by medical images from the inside of the human body: radiography, magnetic resonance and images from optical, confocal and electron microscopy. The edition relates the three screens and gradually establishes meanings between them by their juxtaposition. At the same time, in every screen there is an introspection from the outside to the inside, from the surface to the microscopic level of the body, where instability, war, and illness prevail. Because that is what The Spiritual Machine is about: the possible relation between the mind and the body, the body and the emotions, the emotions and the mind. Here are the questions that The Spiritual Machine confronts, and that tries to formulate inside of the work, always through a journey that starts and ends in the amazing mystery of the human body and psyche. A journey that settles meanings but opens interpretations.

This large-scale audio visual installation results in a poetic, oblique and haunting meditation on domestic life, exposing people behaviours in the private environment from dream states to the hyper-reality of certain routine acts, expressing in images the genuine falsehood of reality representations manifestly false that aspire to surpass the original one. Although this thematic perhaps is more outstanding for the general people than for the art, the imagination and irony transforms a series of routine tasks into creative and scientific experiences, without losing of view the relevance of its social manifestation, nor the expositions of Deleuze about the image-movement, that structures the temporality by means of the organization of the editing task, which is replaced with a rupture of the continuity by the restoration of the temporary unit of image-time longtake shots.