REALITIES / FICTIONS

Exercises in introspection, constructed adaptations and the exhibition of the more intimate, unprejudiced facet are the three main points of departure present in this hall which, under the title of “Realities / Fictions”, contains a new selection of works from Es Baluard’s Permanent Collection. Through drawing, video and photography, the twelve artists represented here bring us closer to a dimension where the boundaries between reality and fiction almost disappear, to raise questions surrounding the individual and society in our times, on the basis of a gradual interpretation that begins with psychic mechanisms until eventually reaching the most explicit corporal language.

The inner self

Using the traditional technique of drawing, along with its association to another, more recent medium – video – the route begins in this first area devoted to introspection. Three artists, Amparo Sard, Núria Marquès and Marcelo Viquez, propose three tales and denounce the state of the individual in today’s society, on the basis of their own experience, with a critique in the first person of the fears and concerns that invade us.

Constructed stories

This area proposes another path which has been developed over the final decades of the 20^th century, in particular in photography and subsequently in video, in which the artist brushes aside the capturing of the “decisive moment” to construct the reality him or herself. Based on the staging of “real fictions”, where in some cases it is the artists themselves who act as the main characters of these “pretend realities” using video, photography and performance to denounce conflicts of gender, wars, social and religious conflicts… with a bearing on the way in which they can all be extrapolated to society in general: the position of the woman in the Islamic world and the duality between East and West, as in the case of Shirin Neshat; customs and stereotypes as tools for enslaving women according to the visions of Pilar Albarracín and Diana Coca; the general violence that is inserted into our lives in a natural fashion, as related by the work of Marina Abramović, or delimited in the form of gender violence and racial discrimination as Alicia Framis shows us.

The culture of provocation

Since the 1970s art has broadened its means of experimentation with creative, ideological and technical freedom in order to connect to the spectator more directly, and in a more provocative fashion, through the performance, video, photography… We can find the continuation of these practices in the works that end the route around the exhibition, where the limits between the private and public spheres blur. The artists frees him or herself of all prejudice and displays the problems surrounding sexuality, rebellion, defiance… included in the proposals by Mònica Fuster, Robert Mapplethorpe, Alberto García-Alix and Joan Morey.