tracey moffatt - vigil - le bastart

Suspension of rights as a rule of law

Emergency art for a normalized state of exception Ukrainian blondes arrive from the East to fulfill men dreams that only money can buy. Other blondes come from Ukraine, amazons who have been risking their lives for years to denounce proxenitism, sexual exploitation, abuse against minorities… It is said of the legendary Amazons that they cut their breasts to handle the bow with greater skill. For Femen girls, instead, their breasts are weapons. On their naked […]

nino maza - seminario - le bastart

The art of borrowing without asking

The practice of appropriation is to apply an ecological sense to art, to recycle signs and forms from the past, often with the intention of desecrating icons, subverting canons, resignifying what used to be true in distant times. Javier Díaz Guardiola, Carmen González Castro and Nino Maza, a triad of curators of which the latter two also participate with their pieces, invite ten artists to “rewind and remaster” tongue in cheek. The hair of the […]

raeda saadeh - vacuum - le bastart

Arab women artists: body, home, territory

The Book of Genesis talks about a man and a woman made together in the image of God. We are not talking about Eva, Adam’s subaltern product, born from his rib as if she were a cyst. We are talking about Lilith, born of dust with Adam on the sixth day. But she soon disappeared from the manichaean script of good and evil. She left Paradise and went into the desert, taking refuge on the […]

diana larrea - sistema de ventilacion - le bastart

Diana Larrea, reinventing streets, rewriting history

She subverts official versions of reality, understands other means of inhabite the city, celebrates anniversaries of women artists missing from art books, she prefers ephemeral interventions in street than museographic embalming of experience…, we could say that Diana Larrea always has felt attracted by the other side of the moon. This is the title of an ongoing group exhibition curated by Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, and refers to the alternative history of recent artistic practices that has […]

aurora duque - eos titono - le bastart

Aurora Duque, why do they call it love?

Collage is a playful craft capable of escape the false absolutism of things, as Max Ernst said, because juxtaposing different realities these are relativized in a poetic and subversive way. But Max Ernst couldn’t yet foresee the current invasion of informative and disinformative collages circulating daily before our eyes, which makes the nowadays artists work of scissors and glue more complicated. The social, hegemonic and patriarchal imaginary has been able to appropriate the fortuitous encounter proclaimed […]

laura pineiro - botones - le bastart

Fine threading

Drawing lines in space, threading stories, making webs … the act of weaving has the quality of being able to include other arts, from drawing to architecture, through writing and music. One of the recurring images of the spinner in mythology is that of weaver of destiny: both the Greek Moiras and their Norse correlates. But the warp that we will trace in this writing defies this idea of predetermined destiny, because our plot will […]

allan kaprow - comfort zones - le bastart

Allan Kaprow, art was like the weather

A and B on their knees slowly approaching each other, A drooling and B wiping the drool, repeating the operation until A can’t drool anymore. This was one of the acts or chapters of Comfort zones activity that Allan Kaprow presented in the mythical Vandrés gallery in a city, Madrid, living a period of suspense (1975), expectant before the impending death of Franco. CA2M (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo) now recuperates that event managed by Fernando Vijande, which meant the […]

paula rego -shakespeare - le bastart

Paula Rego, spawns of the social monster

The mind of Paula Rego works as an alchemical still. She has the hability to absorb, distill and transmute essences of life and fable in which her literary readings reactivate hidden “reefs” of the subconscious. She composes visual stories in which remnants of personal and collective history, dream and memory, intertwine in each other, forming dense plots that trap us, not so much by the narration itself as by the way of joining together. Halfway […]