PHotoEspaña 2011 Attracts A Huge Following in Madrid

Written by Enrico Estevez Thursday, 16 June 2011 00:07

Madrid.- PHotoEspaña 2011 attracts huge following in Madrid and other art centers until July 24. Lisbon, Cuenca, and Alcalá de Henares will also play host to the Festival. The fourteenth annual festival of photography and the visual arts will offer a program of 70 expositions – 21 in the Official Selection, 6 in OpenPHoto, 11 in other halls, and 32 as part of the Off Festival (Festival Off) – in 61 locations, among them museums, galleries, art centers, and exposition spaces. 370 artists and creators, of 55 nationalities, will be participating.

The Official Selection of PHotoEspaña 2011 is structured around both a thematic selection curated by Gerardo Mosquera, who has assigned it the title "Interfaces: Portrait and Communication", and various special projects. The expositions of the Festival will have three other sections: "Other Halls, Myriad Spaces" that will come together as part of PHotoEspaña to promote photography: "OpenPHoto Cuenca", which integrates the projects of embassies and foreign cultural institutions, and the "Off Festival (Festival Off)", which brings together the best works from the major art galleries of Madrid.

Amongst the exhibitions, Centro de Arte/Fundacíon Banco Santander will present "Face Contact" gathering the work of 31 artists who have worked on portraiture and the portrait as an element of identification and communication, from the mid 1960s to the present day. Hans-Peter Feldmann, Shilpa Gupta, Mona Hatoum, Cristina Lucas, Liliana Porter, and Dayanita Singh are just a few of them. The exhibition space Alcalá 31, of the Community of Madrid, will show "1000 Faces/0 Faces/1 Face", featuring the work of Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff and Frank Montero Collado. The Círculo de Bellas Artes and Loewe, Gran Vía 8, are showing "Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire!", an exposition with over 100 photographs from the most famous and controversial paparazzo of the twentieth century and a pioneer of photographing public figures in private moments. In the Sala Minerva, at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, will be "Blazing Camera: The Prostitutes of Fernell Franco", a portrait of the lives of sexual workers in Cali, on the Pacific port of Colombia, during the 1970s. The Colombian artist Fernell Franco captured the abandoned spaces and remote atmosphere with a stylized vigor very much at the artistic vanguard of the time.

El Colecção Berardo de Lisboa participates once more in PHotoEspaña and is showing "A Hundred Times Nguyen", by Alfredo Jaar. The girl Nguyen, whom the artist met at a refugee camp in Hong Kong, is the protagonist of an installation in which the image of her face is repeated over and over again. The work purports to reflect on the distant (and distancing) effect of news reports, and it explores the widening distance between the Third World and the developing countries.


The Royal Botanical Garden (Real Jardín Botánico-CSIC) will host "Face to Time", a reflection on age, aging, and physical evolution through photographs and video installations by five contemporary artists: Esther Ferrer, Péter Forgács, Pere Formiguera, Lucas Sâmaras, and Kan Xuan. The exhibition explores the role of the portrait as a tool for freezing time and showing the metamorphoses it brings about.  The Canal Foundation (Fundación Canal) participates in the Official Selection of PHE11 with an Online Webcam Photography Contest that calls attention to the artistic possibilities of the portrait taken by webcam, and it invites experimentation in this new arena. The contest will take place entirely online, and the participants will compete for prizes of 2,500 €. An international jury will select 50 portraits that will then be exhibited in an online exposition at www.phe.es/concursowebcam. Matadero Madrid presents, in Abierto X Obras (Open for Repairs)", the installation of Carlos Rodríguez-Méndez, "Sitting Men", an artistic exploration of the intensely vivid bodies of men over 70 years old in which the body is converted into physical and emotional material for the work of art.

PHotoEspaña also opens its doors to a series of exhibition projects that do not fall within the purview of the thematic selection curated by Gerardo Mosquera. The Cervantes Institute presents in this group, "Weight and Lightness. Latin American Photography, between Humanism and Violence", a selection of 15 participants in the portfolio exhibitions from the Trasatlántica PHotoEspaña Festival in Managua and Cartagena de Indias, which reflects on the realities of geographic and mental space, conceived in Latin American terms, among artists who share an interest in suggesting a continuous movement between weight and lightness. CaixaForum Madrid joins the Festival with three expositions. "Building the Revolution. Art and Architecture in Russia 1915-1935" unveils one of the most exceptional periods in the history of art, with 230 works including models, paintings, drawings, archival photographs as well as contemporary ones (the latter of which have been culled by British photographer Richard Pare.)


"A Floating World: Photographs by Jaques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986)" collects over 200 pieces that include modern reprints, original snapshots, cameras, notebooks, planners, and the diaries of one of the most formidable names in twentieth century photography. Finally, "Haiti, 34 Seconds After" uses as an example the earthquake in Haiti to show how a humanitarian emergency is experienced, and it emphasizes the transcendent spirit of the Haitians in light of the tragedy.

Numerous other events will be taking place in and around the festival. Each year, PHotoEspaña relies on the involvement and participation of public and private institutions that in turn enable the organization of over 120 expositions and activities. Owing to the faithful commitment of the Ministry of Culture, the Community of Madrid, and the Municipality of Madrid, over 60 foundations, businesses, embassies, cultural centers, and museums have collaborated; joining their ranks this year are Loewe, CaixaForum Madrid, the National Archeology Museum (Museo Arqueológico Nacional), Samsung, and RENFE. The help of all these organizations affirms the project of PHotoEspaña, through work done online, continued institutional collaboration, and broader cultural cooperation, which includes, in addition, other avenues of affiliations. Trasatlántica PHotoEspaña, a forum for photography and the visual arts that is now in its fourth year of existence, has shored up relationships with institutions in Spain and Latin America. OpenPHoto Cuenca, for its part, works with cultural institutes and foreign embassies. Visit the festival's website at ... http://phe.es/

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