rendez-vous nowhere

rendez-vous nowhere is a group show that takes as its starting point the description of an epoch given in the book La Minéralisation de Dudley Craving MacAdam, written by the French artist and poet Juliette Roche in 1918. The novel depicts the arrival—and the cultural translation into a new context—of the European Avant-garde in the USA during the interwar years. The central character is D.C.M.A., a composite of a number of the leading lights of the Dada movement in New York. La Minéralization is a broken and encrypted account, a description of the artistic and political scene of the times that emerges from the fragments, impressions, conversations and details that are blended together in the book. "Am I really a medium of the world or just a reporter?" D.C.M.A. declares shortly before putting an end to his life in his studio, a suicide that takes the form of an erotic ritual in which the main character bites a copper beam and gets mineralized. L a Minéralization —which has never been reprinted since 1924- will be translated into Basque and Spanish, and published in an edition to accompany the exhibition.

The works in the exhibition draw on accounts and events from a recent history, which are part of a collective memory, and are closely connected to literature and the Avant-garde movements of the 20th century. They are "collages" —assemblages of texts, images, architectures and objects—which establish personal codes and processes deliberately difficult to translate into a context other than their own. They are fragments of information transported "out of their space and time" that make use of an interrupted past to silently construct a possible social space of the present. In David Maljkovic's video installation Scene for new heritage "history is transformed into fiction and time engenders collective amnesia"; the watercolors by Silke Otto-Knapp represent groups of figures that vanish in transparent sets and blurred spaces; Oscar Tuazon's paper sculptures are folded pages of a 1968 architecture essay by Steve Baer; Kajsa Dahlberg's work compiles scribbles and notes that re aders of Swedish public libraries left on the margins of Virginia Woolf's novel A Room of One's Own. Other works in the exhibition include the abstract spaces in Marcellvs L'videos; image production devices such as "The Projector of Solids (or the Dream of a Rock)", a camera obscura by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva; Zbynek Baladrán's examination of fragments of texts ranging from The Communist Manifesto to the writings of the Czech architect Karel Honzik; and sculptures by Eva Morant Artazkoz, an accumulation of traversable pieces as fragments of an object "that it is not expect to be revealed".

rendez-vous nowhere

Kuratorin: Beatriz Herraez

Künstler: Zbynek Baladran, Kajsa Dahlberg, Joao Maria Gusmao & Pedro Paiva, Marcellvs L. , David Maljkovic, Eva Morant Artazkoz, Silke Otto-Knapp, Oscar Tuazon