teresa margolles - pistas baile - le bastart

Teresa Margolles, exhuming the fear

Looking at Teresa Margolles work as a whole, we observe that it underlies in it an inherent processual logic, which, interlinking from project to project becomes stronger, and it goes against the systemic logic of capitalism in its gore side (as the also Mexican Sayak Valencia rightly called it). Thus, against the trivialisation of crime she claims grieving for each body, facing the anonymity and reification of the victims she opposes their individuation, in front […]

diana coca - pekin - le bastart

Diana Coca, cross-border tactics

The same gray spreading through highways, tunnels and level crossings, manufacturing plants and new construction blocks. Suburban landscapes that only tread on infinite number of wheels, unavailable for the passer-by. Edges of cement more and more extensive that are repeated without hardly variation all over the world. Also the boundaries, increasingly high, longer, more impassable, are a model that extends through the world with few variations: containment barriers, electrified wire fences, motion sensors… In both […]

mosaico bikini girls - piazza armerina - le bastart

Athletic transgressions

Winckelmann revolutionized the historiography of ancient art by turning to the mystique of erotic contemplation. The artists’ school was in the gyms, he writes as he imagines Fidias going to the stadium to study the harmonious proportions of the athletes, their muscles in tension, the choreographic beauty of the struggles in the arena… Also, he figured Socrates in the arena recruiting young ephebos to whom to instruct in the art of the temperance. The contemplation […]

miss beige - contraluz - le bastart

Si tu me dices beige…

Miss Beige is an inveterate flaneur, wearing out her shoe (beige?) soles, wandering around bland neighborhoods, taking photos before the lowered blinds of a sex shop (Mundo fantástico), next to a parking meter (La bella y la bestia) or between ugly suburban buildings, because she knows that beauty is elsewhere. Almost as if following the advice of Walter Benjamin to experience the street creatively and escape of the clusters that moves robotic by pre-determined paths, […]

lee lozano - portrait - le bastart

Lee Lozano: splices, short circuits and scapes

Lee Lozano was an artist who didn’t want to be one more piece in the gear of art, who by her blood and guts came to choose what type of buyer were suitable to acquire her work; who decided where, how and when to exhibit; who fixed the moment of get to the top of her career and the term to finish it. Stubborn and irreverent, in 1970 managed to show in the most prestigious […]

david trullo - boys love - le bastart

David Trullo, subversive museographies

David Trullo travels to the past again and again. It has done so by collecting visual flashes that somehow contributed to forge his personality (Timewarp), reconstructing episodes mutilated by the heteronormative speech (A true history) … Now, in his two current expositions reviews the queer iconography confronting with pieces of the National Museum of Decorative Arts (Queer cabinet) and tracing a personal homoerotic genealogy impregnated with lyricism and irony in equal parts (Souvenirs). The truth […]

veronica ruth frias- last supper - le bastart

Veronica Ruth Frias, life breaking the solemnity of art

The equivalence between art and life, the will to make life a matter of art in order to question inertia and patterns of behavior was decisive in the happening of the seventies, in the actions of Fluxus, in the first wave of feminism … However, during the last third of the twentieth century, the theme of motherhood was a burden for women artists, obsessed in their struggle to escape from the domestic sphere to which […]

pierre molinier - hanel - le bastart

Molinier and D’Agata, orphic beings

Photography is always a capture of an announced death. There is no future in it, said Roland Barthes. What you show will no longer return, if it has ever been. No wonder it is an artistic expression of those who are seduced by death most. Both the self-portraits that Pierre Molinier staged in the last years of his life locked in his apartment, like the photographs that Antoine d’Agata has been making from himself and […]