Category: Exhibitions

paloma pajaro - durero - le bastart

Paloma Pájaro, rethinking the human

The wisdom of Homo Sapiens is questionable. The more knowledge, the less understanding. It would have been more appropriate to call the species Homo Spiritualis, said the anthropologist amazed by the rock art of the cave of Chauvet. But, as the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary reads, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. But, as it says in the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. We neither understand the propitiatory meaning of these magical symbols nor […]

carol rama - seduzioni - le bastart

Carol Rama, one hundred years dancing backwards

Alors vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals musette et cet envers sera son véritable endroit, Antonin Artaud It was back in the 1930’s when Antonin Artaud was in and out of asylums; in the same decade, Carol Rama went daily to visit her mother admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The encounter with sick bodies and confinement conditions inspired her first watercolors. In 1945, Rama celebrates her first exhibition […]

paloma navares - iluminaciones - le bastart

Paloma Navares, night vision

Continents too narrow for their content: bodies trapped in glass boxes, feline fierceness fading in black cages … The bars jail, like the panthers, were no more than shadows of a deep dream of Paloma Navares, shadows that throughout her life has been veiling appearances, so she has been forced to grope what is not apparent. The idea of confinement that upholds her artistic work is probably a reflection of the fear of being trapped […]

fatima mazmouz - uterus - le bastart

Fatima Mazmouz; the uterus, from a sacred niche to a desecrated territory

The uterus is a restless animal, which if not fertilized in time it moves through the woman body causing havoc wherever it goes: palpitations, seizures… It was that simple the diagnosis that doctors and philosophers such as Hippocrates and Plato attributed to what they called “hysteria”, a Greek term referring to the womb. And centuries go by… and psychoanalysis continued to relate unsatisfied female sexuality with “hysterical” disorders. Actually, the bizarre history of the uterus […]

raquel paiewonsky - guardarropia - le bastart

Raquel Paiewonsky, irreducible hybridity

The island’s geography has been chosen by writers and utopians as the ideal place for the development of horizontal communities, without rich or poor, without envy or competitiveness, such as Aldous Huxley’s Pala. But the history tells us otherwise, locating in the most beautiful islands bloody chronicles of colonial despotism, cultural extermination and natural exploitation, to end up as a cover photo in a tourist brochure. The Dominican Raquel Paiewonsky belongs to a generation of […]

irene cruz - blue - le bastart

Irene Cruz, territorial rootlessness, emotional roots

In l’heure bleue, nocturnal animals have already gone to sleep and diurnal ones have not yet awoken. The entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre talked about this magical hour as a privileged moment to observe quiet nature, before the parade of armored beetles and other hardened insects on which he fantasized as if they were exotic ethnic groups. During the twilight hour the forms blur, nothing remains, shadows become longer. The thought flows and looks inside. It is […]

tracey moffatt - other - le bastart

Tracey Moffatt, interracial desire, a matter of ghosts

Je pense que le couple nègre/blanche est pire qu’une bombe, writes Dany Laferrière (Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatiguer, 1985). Sexuality is, more than anything, a matter of ghosts, and the ghost that join a black man and a white woman is one of the most explosive that there is. Sexual imaginaries in relation to ethnic otherness continue to bear the burden of colonial legacy. The topics are renewed, adapting to the changing demands […]

orge carruana - shunga - le bastart

Jorge Carruana, love under the shrapnel

To be born in the forties of last century in a Cuba in transit between a dictatorship and a revolution that was nothing more than the preamble of another dictatorial regime, growing lulled by black and white Disney cartoons while the news were reporting the final leg of the Second World War, the sorcerer’s apprentice…, all that left a hotchpotch of memories in Jorge Carruana‘s vertiginous imagination. These lasting memories will return as raw images […]