Latitudes hosts the MA Curating Contemporary Art students of the Royal College of Art in Barcelona
Tue, Oct 7 2014 |
| Photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption). |
This morning we had an informal discussion with second-year students of the Royal College of Art's MA Curating Contemporary Art programme to present and reflect on our collaborations with three Barcelona-based artists – Martí Anson, Ignasi Aballí and Francesc Ruiz. It was an opportune moment to reconsider the old chestnut of "the artist-curator relationship" and the important role of artist advocacy and friendship in curatorial work.
Our first case study was with Martí Anson and was in the context of our participation in the 2010 iteration of 'No Soul for Sale – A Festival of Independents' at Tate Modern, coinciding with Tate's 10th anniversary. In our presentation we discussed how Martí's project "Mataró Chauffeur Service" began by the simple need for us to get to London and present our projects in the festival context, how we worked together with Martí in thinking which was the best format for the project to develop considering all the budget would have to be raised and that the invitation was limited to offering 25m2 at Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.
A year later, we invited Martí to present Joaquimandson, a project centred on researching and recuperating the fabrication of 1960s low-budget furniture designs his father produced for friends, family and clients in Mataró. A selection of the furniture was exhibited at Meessen de Clercq, Brussels, alongside works by Sarah Ortmeyer, Kasper Akhoj, Maria Loboda and Charlotte Moth
In the summer of 2009, Carol Yinghua Lu invited us to curate a new commission by Ignasi Aballí at the SUITCASE Art Project, the then project space of the Today Art Museum in Beijing. The resulting interventions in the eight display cases of the Yintai Centre, focused on absence, nothingness and invisibility, recurring concerns in Aballí's practice. A year after, we interviewed Ignasi for 'The Last Star-Ledger', the yellow issue of 'The Last Newspaper' publication we edited in the context of the New Museum show in 2010. The interview 'Rank and File' focused on his series of newspaper-cut outs from El País newspaper that he has been doing since 1997.
After a short presentation on the context of the 2009 exhibition "Sequelism part 3: Possible, Probable or Preferable Futures" at Arnolfini in Bristol, and Francesc Ruiz's stair-barrier commission, Ruiz discussed his Yayoi, Sukia and "The Green Detour" commission for Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo, and of course Francesc's weekly cartoons for the ten 'The Last Newspaper'. Here an interview with Francesc published in the third issue, 'The Last Register" and a profile of his work included in frieze magazine.
Thank you Galeria Estrany · de la Mota for the temporary gallery take over!
Related content:
- Ignasi Aballí's exhibition catalogue 'Nothing, or Something' available now, 26 October 2009
- flickr gallery with installation shots of "Sequelism Part 3..."
- Publication release: 'Mataró Chauffeur Service', a project by Martí Anson & Latitudes for 'No Soul for Sale', Tate Modern, London, May 2010, 11 March 2011
- Ignasi Aballí at ARTIUM and Latitudes' archive (Beijing & New York),20 May 2012
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All photos: Latitudes | www.lttds.org (except when noted otherwise in the photo caption)
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