projects2017

Artists: Adelaida Antúnez Egurbide, Adrián Pino Olivera, Register Registrated aka Regina San Martino, Yansy Soler Peña, Toni Molins, Ada Fontecilla & Patri Feliu, Mireia Borrell i Vilapuig, Hannah Bere, Berta Vallribera, Manuel Latour

12-15_12_2017

At La Cera 13

the room sheet (only available in Catalan) ➩

notes from the curator :

this project was conceived thinking about the phallus and the semiotical regime it stealthily operates with ... my room sheet was accompanied by these ⤳ images of ancient Greek herms (or 'hermas') , phallus bearing busts that starkly highlight the two most valued mechanics of functional masculinity : intelligence and virility ... these were used in Greek and Roman culture from the 12th Century BC to beyond 600 AD as border-markers , as warning signs and as good luck charms for fertility ... they were celebratory , menacing , delimiting tools that very obviously got their message across through their visuality ...

so i thought , is the phallus , as a socio-political tool , still present in visual culture ? has it become more stealthy ? more subtle ? more omnipresent ? does it make use of mirrors , echos or proxies (substitutional representation) ?

i thought about what Henri Lefebvre said about commemorative monuments in "The Production of Space" ... how it wasn't coincidence that they take on the form of a pinnacle , a long , pointy object that penetrates the sky ... the Greek herms and Lefebvre's monuments are still very present in visual culture ... but where , and how ?

in early October 2017 , i sent out this ➾ letter / invitation to a series of artists who i either knew had work dealing with the subject at hand , or would possibly be willing to create something in tandem with the prompt ... of the 11 artists that ended up participating , 7 of the works were created specifically for the occasion ... some were products of conversations i had with the artists , and one was one of my own contributions ☟

i decided to include an installation entrance piece that would serve as a kind of carpet on which people would stumble upon entry ... i made screenshots of different Tinder profiles , on top of which i tried to humorously decipher their hidden intentions ... i spray painted styrofoam cones in gold and hot-pink and formed the shape of a phallus ...

Berta Vallribera ⇯ decided to play with the title of the exhibition , (PR O XY PH A LL US which puts emphasis on the separation of the letters , highlighting the 'XY' , 'male' chromosomes) ... this banner , black ink printed on canvass , served as another welcoming entrance into the concept of the show : the celebration and acceptance of phallic omnipresence ...

Toni Molins' ⤒ representation of Gustav von Aschenbach , the famed protagonist of Death in Venice ... he exposes the overly-romanticised desires of the protagonist that have been the subject of discussion for decades ... specifically , Toni humorously reproduces the moment of his death , as depicted in the Luchino Visconti film ; he dies , exposed , watching what he desires live on ...

Adrián Pino Olivera ⥉ was known for a series of performances under the title PROJECTE V carried out throughout Europe from 2014-2019 in which he would undress , tuck his penis and imitate the pose of emblematic classical works of art depicting women as canonical objects ... he would perform this in museums , unannounced , in front of the respective works and , naturally , in front of the public who happened to be viewing said works at that time ... he was fined many times and banned from the Louvre ...

in nulling his own phallus in front of works in which women were depicted from the gaze of the phallus , he sought to vindicate the passive acceptance of these historical works ... in the action featured in the show , he stands before Michelangelo's Davide , canonical ode to masculinity and virility , and assumes the pose of the Venus ...

Regina San Martino aka Register Registrated ⇭ participated with two pieces : a flash-activated flasher and a "vell verd" (Catalan for an "old green" man who prays on young people) doused with wine (throughout the show's opening) , the stains resembling phalli ...

i decided to mount the wall text and herms on golden streamers , ironically celebrating the concept ... under it , one of Hannah Bere's phallus-fists was used as a paperweight for the room sheets that the public could take home ...

Mireia Borrell i Vilapuig ⥣ screen-printed a woven vagina dedicated to Artemis , a protector of female sexuality ... i wanted to have one phallus-less moment in the show , something that could dialogue with Adrián's piece of nullifying phallic semiotics and structures in favour of other deities associated with femininity : in his case , Venus , in Mireia's case , Artemis ...

Hannah Bere's ↟ 'Blue Room' was featured as well as casts of her penetrating fists ... 'Blue Room' is a nude of Hannah , typical of the Millennial generation : a pixelated dirty pic , shared on cheap phones ... a cursor caresses her chest , lips , eyes and nipple ... here the cursor is the proxy , a substitute for some other kind of probing member , a finger , a phallus ... a pseudo-haptic access to touch a desired body ... the cursor , pointed , accurate , mirrors the act of touching without consequences , the phallus hidden behind a seemingly innocuous symbol , the user hidden behind a screen , masked , faceless ...

Hannah Bere's penetrating fists also act as phallic doubles , and where dispersed throughout the exhibition space ...

Yansy Soler Peña ⇯ created a performative installation piece , literally assembling a hut , in a food-truck style , selling sandwiches made with 'macho asado' (Spanish for 'roasted male') ... this Cuban tradition , and the name it bears , is ironic given the fact that Cuba's relationship with masculinity and misogyny is unfortunately strong , yet one of their most famous , performative and celebratory dishes involves roasting and devouring a male (pig) ...

Adelaida Antúnez Egurbide ⇡ constructed this phallic dome covered in bread and wet dough inside and out ... the phallic baguettes on the inside very literally attack the spectator upon entering the structure ... bread is the most basic and common form of sustenance in most communities and cultures on Earth ... bread is as omnipresent and ancient as the phallus : both find idolatry uses and have major visual and totemic presences in many cultures worldwide ...

Manuel Latour ⟰ composed this gif-bouquet of phalli that would dance across the wall every 6 seconds ... the phallus almost looses its recognisability when mashed and mangled with other phalli and images that seem like ___ but may not be ... here , one has to train their vision to correctly spot and defeat the phallus ...

Ada Fontecilla and Patri Feliu made small vacuum-sealed bags with small trinkets that are all euphemisms for penetrative pleasures and erotic fantasies ... to decipher the euphemism , you have to visually and perceptively train yourself , think dirty ...