Iranzu Antona
21 Jan - 02 Mar 2014
IRANZU ANTONA
Dar encuentro
21 January - 2 March 2014
Sala Rekalde presents an exhibition by Iranzu Antona (Pamplona, 1979), included in the barriek programme which puts on show the works of artists who have been awarded Becas de Creación Artística from the Regional Council of Bizkaia.
The work featured in the Dar encuentro exhibition precisely considers the confluence of formal models and how combining elements results in new creations. This mixture of styles and approaches may take the form to the possibility of thinking of other spaces and of other ways of occupying them. Iranzu’s work is characterised for its experimental use of images captured in an apparently casual, touristic way. The exhibition consists of photographs, a video screening, different sculptures produced for the occasion and an in-situ spatial intervention with the created partitions that modify the real space of the display window to organise a specific space.
The fetichising component of touristic photography eventually desacralizes great icons from the history of architecture. Their conversion into an image of spectacularity places the Lever House in New York on a par with temple remains in Ancient Greece. Photographs, in their obscene drive to capture buildings in their entirety, betray their structure and distort their forms. Skyscrapers are abducted and possessed by the camera’s gaze. Taken elsewhere. Introduced into the dynamic of digital reproductibility and turned into consumer objects at the core of the globalised tourist industry.
In the exhibition Dar encuentro two formal paradigms collide, two ways of understanding the body and the surrounding space, two constructive ideologies that correspond to distant and disparate contexts. When he designed the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe mentioned the tripartite arrangement of Greek architecture: the base acts as a vestibule, the shaft houses the central office body, and the capital completes the structure of the building. There can be no break without citationality. And modernity is constructed upon the pillars of Eurocentric culture and is established upon the first fissures in the Enlightenment project.
The Seagram, perhaps one of the most emblematic buildings in the International style, symbolises corporatism and the rise of the capitalist system that typifies modernity. Inside, spaces are distributed and there is a distribution of bodies. Spaces allotted to accommodate offices, compartments in which human performance is programmed in pursuit of labour productivity.
Architecture can be understood as a discipline. Because discipline, according to Foucault, proceeds before all else to distribute individuals within space. It assigns locations and organises bodies, the ranks and power relations that are set up between them. It orders the crowd so as to minimise individual singularities.
In many senses, all architecture starts from thinking about the body, which becomes the foundation for the conceptualisation of space. The shape of the Greek column reveals an underlying anthropocentric conception. As is true of the emphasis of the columns, the curvature of the entablature or the different optical corrections that the Greeks performed on their temples to make them appear perfect to the human eye.
The body summons subjectivity, the formless desire for other forms that appear in the exhibition space as reinvented sculptural fragments that seem reminiscent but they are not, they resemble but don’t. Forms that summon the precedents but on invoking them transform them into others. Shapes perhaps that until now were unthinkable or even unimaginable.
In this appearance, in this mixture of styles and manners of doing, there is a taking of form to some kind of limit. A burst. And something suggests the possibility of thinking other spaces, other ways of occupying them and/or living in them, other ways of being and being within them.
Maite Garbayo Maeztu
THE ARTIST www.iranzuantona.com
Iranzu Antona (Pamplona, 1979) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She has taken part in numerous workshops, with the most recent including, Falsos márgenes: mucho ruido y pocas nueces [False Margins: Much Ado About Nothing], coordinated by Txuspo Poyo at the Bilbao Arte Foundation (2010) and Organigrama [Flowchart] run by Ibon Aranberri at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona (2011). Iranzu took first prize at the 2007 Pamplona Young Artists awards by Pamplona City Council and she has been awarded grants and scholarships by the Government of Navarra and Bizkaia Provincial Council.
Her individual exhibitions include Los clásicos reconfortan [Classics Comfort] at the Sala Polvorín at La Ciudadela (Pamplona - 2011). She has taken part in group exhibitions, Beldurrarentzat Beranduegi with Zuhar Iruretagoiena at the Egia Exhibition Centre (San Sebastián 2008), Puertas Abiertas Residentes 2009 [Residents Open Doors] at Bilbao Arte and Ertibil Bizkaia 2010, the travelling exhibition opened at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, to name just a few.
Dar encuentro
21 January - 2 March 2014
Sala Rekalde presents an exhibition by Iranzu Antona (Pamplona, 1979), included in the barriek programme which puts on show the works of artists who have been awarded Becas de Creación Artística from the Regional Council of Bizkaia.
The work featured in the Dar encuentro exhibition precisely considers the confluence of formal models and how combining elements results in new creations. This mixture of styles and approaches may take the form to the possibility of thinking of other spaces and of other ways of occupying them. Iranzu’s work is characterised for its experimental use of images captured in an apparently casual, touristic way. The exhibition consists of photographs, a video screening, different sculptures produced for the occasion and an in-situ spatial intervention with the created partitions that modify the real space of the display window to organise a specific space.
The fetichising component of touristic photography eventually desacralizes great icons from the history of architecture. Their conversion into an image of spectacularity places the Lever House in New York on a par with temple remains in Ancient Greece. Photographs, in their obscene drive to capture buildings in their entirety, betray their structure and distort their forms. Skyscrapers are abducted and possessed by the camera’s gaze. Taken elsewhere. Introduced into the dynamic of digital reproductibility and turned into consumer objects at the core of the globalised tourist industry.
In the exhibition Dar encuentro two formal paradigms collide, two ways of understanding the body and the surrounding space, two constructive ideologies that correspond to distant and disparate contexts. When he designed the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe mentioned the tripartite arrangement of Greek architecture: the base acts as a vestibule, the shaft houses the central office body, and the capital completes the structure of the building. There can be no break without citationality. And modernity is constructed upon the pillars of Eurocentric culture and is established upon the first fissures in the Enlightenment project.
The Seagram, perhaps one of the most emblematic buildings in the International style, symbolises corporatism and the rise of the capitalist system that typifies modernity. Inside, spaces are distributed and there is a distribution of bodies. Spaces allotted to accommodate offices, compartments in which human performance is programmed in pursuit of labour productivity.
Architecture can be understood as a discipline. Because discipline, according to Foucault, proceeds before all else to distribute individuals within space. It assigns locations and organises bodies, the ranks and power relations that are set up between them. It orders the crowd so as to minimise individual singularities.
In many senses, all architecture starts from thinking about the body, which becomes the foundation for the conceptualisation of space. The shape of the Greek column reveals an underlying anthropocentric conception. As is true of the emphasis of the columns, the curvature of the entablature or the different optical corrections that the Greeks performed on their temples to make them appear perfect to the human eye.
The body summons subjectivity, the formless desire for other forms that appear in the exhibition space as reinvented sculptural fragments that seem reminiscent but they are not, they resemble but don’t. Forms that summon the precedents but on invoking them transform them into others. Shapes perhaps that until now were unthinkable or even unimaginable.
In this appearance, in this mixture of styles and manners of doing, there is a taking of form to some kind of limit. A burst. And something suggests the possibility of thinking other spaces, other ways of occupying them and/or living in them, other ways of being and being within them.
Maite Garbayo Maeztu
THE ARTIST www.iranzuantona.com
Iranzu Antona (Pamplona, 1979) graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). She has taken part in numerous workshops, with the most recent including, Falsos márgenes: mucho ruido y pocas nueces [False Margins: Much Ado About Nothing], coordinated by Txuspo Poyo at the Bilbao Arte Foundation (2010) and Organigrama [Flowchart] run by Ibon Aranberri at the Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona (2011). Iranzu took first prize at the 2007 Pamplona Young Artists awards by Pamplona City Council and she has been awarded grants and scholarships by the Government of Navarra and Bizkaia Provincial Council.
Her individual exhibitions include Los clásicos reconfortan [Classics Comfort] at the Sala Polvorín at La Ciudadela (Pamplona - 2011). She has taken part in group exhibitions, Beldurrarentzat Beranduegi with Zuhar Iruretagoiena at the Egia Exhibition Centre (San Sebastián 2008), Puertas Abiertas Residentes 2009 [Residents Open Doors] at Bilbao Arte and Ertibil Bizkaia 2010, the travelling exhibition opened at Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, to name just a few.