MACBA Launches New Program with Three Works by Armando Andrade Tudela

Written by Gabriel Costa Tuesday, 15 May 2012 23:18

BARCELONA.- In presenting the first solo shows in Spain by three artists, MACBA seeks to strengthen the role played by Capella MACBA in its activities as a whole. The Peruvian Armando Andrade Tudela (Lima, 1975), followed by the Moroccan Latifa Echakhch (El Khnansa, 1974) will be the first artists showcased in a new approach to artistic production at the exhibition centre in Capella MACBA, the former church of the Convent of Els Àngels. Under this new line, shows presented will have a common denominator: they will all feature works produced especially for this particular venue. However, this is not an attempt to forge links with architecture; rather, it is an initiative aimed at fostering the creation, through a specific topos, of new works that can, in the future, come to form part of the MACBA Collection. On view through 6 June.

Andrade Tudela launches the Capella MACBA Series with three new works produced in 2010: two 16mm films, Marcahuasi and Synanon, transferred to video, and a mural piece, Sense títol, for which the artist has designed a most unusual structure. Tudela will be followed by the artists Echakhch and Pep Duran. All these exhibitions will be complemented by electronic publications that will soon be made available from the MACBA website.

Armando Andrade Tudela (1975, Lima, Peru) lives between Berlin and Saint-Étienne (France). He studied at the Universidad Pontificia in Lima, the Royal College of Art in London and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. Though his work has been presented in Dijon (Frac Bourgogne), Berlin (DAAD), Birmingham (Ikon Gallery), Frankfurt (FKV), Basel (Kunsthalle Basel) and London (Counter Gallery and Annet Gelink Gallery), ahir, demà is his first solo exhibition in Spain. He has also participated in major group exhibitions in Lima, Warsaw, Vienna and New York, at the Shanghai and San Pablo biennials and in two exhibitions at MACBA (Modernologías and Tiempo como materia. Nuevas adquisiciones, 2009).

Tudela’s work explores form and its relationship to time. Time can only be understood through the objects and events that materialize it. Artistic practice is a way of rendering time current through matter. More specifically, Armando Andrade Tudela is concerned with relating different ways of interpreting objects and, thus, different ways of conceiving the future through the multiplicity of pasts to which each culture has access.

In his work, Andrade Tudela seeks to map the relations between form, type and meaning. At the core of his project for Capella MACBA are two films with running time of eight and ten minutes respectively, and a mural piece formed by frames and glass. All are supported by an ephemeral architectural structure that the artist designed specifically to present the three new works at Capella MACBA. The films both focus on archaeological remains. Synanon (2010) features recent human remains, whilst Marcahuasi (2010) depicts a remote, natural site: an impressive volcanic rock formation that has given rise to the most grotesque theories. A fascinating correspondence is established between the two, questioning the way in which we interpret what we see.

Are these images symbols of a universal form that goes beyond the here and now? Or, like furniture in a second-hand store (Synanon), are they merely remains from fleeting life, specific, bound to everyday conditions? The two films work as a diptych: one presents culture through objects, the other, nature as a place of worship. The third piece, Sense títol, installed in one of the side spaces at Capella MACBA, is a large mural work featuring an interplay of glass and reflections. In it, by depicting a process in which an image is edited, Tudela questions the concept of totality.

The three works, together with the exhibition architecture produced by the artist, are separate yet interdependent. As a group, they encompass the interests that Armando Andrade Tudela explores through his output. Culture is founded on the possibility of historical transmission, of knowledge travelling, repeating and transforming itself, giving rise to other systems of knowledge. This process generates numerous forms of codification – one of them without question being modernity – but codes are not transparent and contain other modes of signification within them. Changes and alterations take place in this continual journey and although they may seem to be a distortion of the original project, a form of folklore, in the end they are the key that forces us to rethink not only the great narratives but also their interpretation by the various institutions that have learned to recall certain fragments of the message and to completely forget, or exclude, others.

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