The Good Citizens

The Good Citizens takes the museum structure as starting point to reflect on individuality, collectivity and the influence they exert on each other. The limits of the physical space, certain symbolic objects and the performative action create a narrative in which movement and language are determined by the physical and symbolic environment, by substance and context, by society and time, echoing the conscious and unconscious biases that direct our thinking, our movement and our language. The aseptic microcosm of the exhibition deprives the action of a realistic context, allowing for a conceptual and symbolic approach to conventionalism and the mechanisms of social influence on the individual. The characters in The Good Citizens start their journey as individuals, but will soon undergo a process of socialisation, an ebb and flow in which the process is much more revealing than the final result.

 

Raquel Durán and Rut Briones

Raquel Durán and Rut Briones have partnered artistically since 2014, during a residency at Fundación Bilbao Arte (Bilbao, Spain). During that time they produced Foodlândia, a project that started as a series of short video segments that explore our relationship as society with food; and later on developed as an audiovisual installation. This project was selected by the art jury at Bilbao Arte to have an individual exhibition at the foundation in 2015. A year later, it was selected for the IX Premio Auditorio de Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, Galicia) and Kaleartean (Basauri, Basque Country). Also in 2015, they were part of ArteShop Bilbao, mentoring art students and producing Carnivale, a dark chronic of the post-industrial era exhibited at the office for Tourism at Bilbao’s Golden Mile. This is the first project in which the artists used the cinemagraph, a hybrid format half-way between photography and video. Profondément Superficiel (2016), also a cinemagraph, explores the concepts of appearance and the representation of the self, and was the precursor of the series Flâneur Domestique (2017), a work that addresses the anxieties and perceptions that our private spheres reveal. Currently, the artistic pair is at an art residency in Bregenz, Austria; as part of an exchange programme between the Kunsthaus and Fundación Bilbao Arte.

 

On The Edge Of

On The Edge Of is the collective exhibition of David Cantarero Tomás and Raquel Durán & Rut Briones, residents at Bregenz as part of the exchange programme between the Kunsthaus and Fundación Bilbao Arte.

In this exhibition, at Galerie Lisi Hämmerle, the artists will show the work they have developed during the two months of the residency, articulating the final results in a joint exhibit that tries to find the commonality between the proposals. This commonality started out with concept of limit and was then narrowed to the specific of the edge, a physical and formal edge in the case of David’s work; a more abstract or phylosophical one in Raquel and Rut’s work.

In Dialog mit dem Bild David plays with the boundaries between object, image representation and perception. In The Good Citizens, Raquel Durán and Rut Briones play with the boundaries between individual and collectivity, between influence and imposition.

They now invite you to come and enjoy a walk on that edge.

 

BIO

David Cantarero Tomás graduated from the University of Barcelona in Fine Arts, where he also obtained a Master’s Degree in Contemporary Thought. He is currently pursuing a PhD program, having earned a Master’s Degree in Art Practice from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He completed his studies at the UWE, in Bristol (UK) and at the FAD-UNAM, in Mexico City. He has been awarded in different calls and prizes such as the Biennale of Mislata, Public Art Prize 2016, the Grants for the Production of Art Projects 2016 of the BilbaoArte Foundation, the XV CALL of the Luis Adelantado Gallery (Valencia) or the University of Zaragoza Art Prize 2010. He has also enjoyed different artist-in-residence programs like the last at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, or the SAARI Residence 2014 in Finland, and has exhibited in a number of different international art centres and galleries.

 

Statement

By intervening surfaces and spaces through different types of images, either in the form of printings and/or projections, I generate artworks that would acquire various forms such as photography, video or audio-visual installation, and that could be catalogued as metapictures, i.e. second-degree visual reflections on what the images themselves are. Showing a certain effect of strangeness that in some occasions is produced by occultation/exhibition and in others by saturation/repetition, the artworks will tackle issues related to the modes of circulation of images nowadays, as well as to the actuality of notions such as representation, simulacrum or mimesis, and aspects related to the impact of mass media and technology at individual and social level.

During my stay in Bregenz, these general ideas have been materialized in a series of installations which have taken different formats from a common starting element, the flag. An object with a significant presence in the environment, and that placed in a multitude of supports and located on facades, sidewalks, gardens and terraces, can be found in places ranging from buildings of official agencies and government to large companies and small businesses, passing by tourist attractions. An element that, due to its formal characteristics as well as its history, has been thought especially suitable to lead the reflection on notions such as visibility and limit, connecting both in the task of whether to evidence or to dilute, this is not very clear, the outlines of certain abstract boundaries made by humans, and the increasingly subtle and hard to guess limits of the image today.