Exhibitions
El rostre infinit
Exhibition by Juan Urrios, ORLAN, Helena Vinent curated by Mercè Alsina
Espai d’Arts de Roca Umbert
Carrer d’Enric Prat de la Riba, 77, 08401, Granollers, Barcelona
From October 19 to November 26
Timetable
| Friday | 17:30-20:00 |
| Saturday | 11:00-14:00 and 17:30-20:00 |
| Sunday | 11:00–14:00 |
The face is a scenario of conflict between what reduces us to the common and what means us as different individuals. On the one hand, it is a communication device that is subject to certain rules, but at the same time it is also a space of imagination, protest and fantasy, through which we show ourselves to the world. A world that, with current surveillance and control systems and especially the Facial recognition software , turns our faces into our own whistleblowers.
With surgical performances, ORLAN already expressed, in the mid-90s of the last century, a critical, ironic and rebellious stance against canons with an attempt to force the sculpture of the face as an exercise in revolt that challenged the concept of beauty attributed to the female face throughout history and artistic representations. The artist thus demanded the right to build himself and show himself according to his own desire.
In the same period, Juan Urrios, with the series Ortopedia, from 1992, presented images of inmates of the Model prison in which he superimposed portraits of different individuals, with a critical look at the use of photography as a tool for identification and control. If nineteenth-century photography believed that, with the possibility of portraying individuals, it could establish criteria of normality and abnormality based on physical typologies, Urrios’ monsters rebelled against any technology that proposed a categorization of the face. Helena Vinent, with a 2021 project, challenges the new eugenics and the impositions of an ableist system that, according to Martha Nussbaum, opens up tensions between the desire for autonomy, the search for capacities for self-realization and the awareness of the intrinsic vulnerability that characterizes us as a species.
In these three projects, the body, but in particular the face, is shown as a workhorse against factual inequalities and categorizations, while positioning itself as a space of resistance to the repeated attempts to control individuals through technology and science.
Juan Urrios
Graduated in Fine Arts in Barcelona, he continued his studies at the Ecole de Beaux Arts in Grenoble, France. He has taught photography at the Serra i Abella School of Art and Design in L’Hospitalet. He has received scholarships from institutions, both public and private, such as the Grant for stays abroad from the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya (1990), the Instituto de la Juventud del Ministerio de Asuntos Sociales (1990), or Banesto (1990). In his works, formulated in closed series, photography – sometimes digitally manipulated – is the common medium that combines and “contaminates” with other artistic disciplines to lead us to reflect on contents of social themes. This line of work has been recognized with national and international awards, such as the special mention of the critics of the 3rd Tokyo International Photo-Biennale (1999), the Prize of Plastic Arts of the Biennial of Barcelona (1989), and the first prize of the XXV International Drawing Prize Joan Miró (1986).
ORLAN
“I’M ORLAN, AMONG OTHER THINGS AND AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. EVERY LETTER OF MY NAME IS WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS BECAUSE I DON’T WANT TO BE PIGEONHOLED.”
ORLAN is one of the most influential French artists on an international scale.
It is not governed by any material, technology or artistic practice. He uses sculpture, photography, performance, video, 3D, video games, augmented reality, artificial intelligence and robotics (he has created an image and likeness robot that speaks with the voice), as well as scientific and medical techniques such as surgery and biotechnology, to question the social phenomena of our time from a critical distance.
ORLAN has created the magazine Art-Accès Revue in minitel. ORLAN founded and organized the Lyon International Symposium on Performance and Video.
ORLAN is constantly and radically changing what is given, breaking conventions and prefabricated thinking. It opposes natural, social and political determinism and all forms of domination, male supremacy, religion, cultural segregation and racism.
Helena Vinent
Helena Vinent works with different formats that include video, photography, text, sculpture, performance or installation. Dissociation, subtitles, noise, technological acceleration, prostheses, error, misunderstandings, body control policies, identity alliances and speculative spaces are designations that can be used to define her lines of artistic research. His work, crossed by crip-queer discourse and anti-ableism, addresses the idea of human, posthuman and subhuman construction, showing special interest in the production of new imaginaries that subvert the functional norms of bodies. Through her work, she explores the limits of the human and the physical and political consequences of this conception, starting from the premise that in an ableist society the body assigned as disabled does not read as a complete human body.
Graduated in Arts Applied to Sculpture from the Llotja School and in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, she is currently studying the Master’s Degree in Cultural Studies and Visual Arts (feminist and leather/queer perspectives) at the Miguel Hernández University. She has participated in collective and individual exhibitions nationally and internationally, in cities such as Barcelona, Madrid, Rotterdam, Kassel, Palma, Nancy, Montpellier or Mexico City. She has carried out artistic residencies at Fabra i Coats, Hangar and La Escocesa (Barcelona) and has received several awards and scholarships, among which the Sala d’Art Jove prize, the Guasch Coranty scholarship, the Hangar production grant, the Güell Foundation Visual Arts grant, the Baumannlab production grant, stand out. the ICUB Creation and Museums grant, the 2021 Generación Award, the grant for Research and Innovation in the field of Visual Arts from the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Barcelona Awards 2020 grant and the Miquel Casablancas award. His work is in the collections of the Montemadrid Foundation, the Guasch Coranty Foundation, the Güell Foundation, Sant Andreu Contemporani and the MACBA.
Mercè Alsina
Mercè Alsina (Barcelona, 1966) is a doctor in Art History, independent curator and journalist. It has a long history in the organization and management of cultural events and exhibitions. She has produced an extensive production of journalistic materials for the written press and television, as well as documentaries.
Among the research topics she has researched are the impact of globality on artistic productions and their circulation, questions of identity and historical representation, speculative materialism and the nature of objects, the video essay as a practice of resistance, among others. She is a member of the Catalan and International Association of Art Critics (ACCA and AICA) since 1990. Between 2003 and 2015 she was a member of the board of directors of the Catalan section as secretary. Since 2019 she has been an advisor and part of the programming team of the Festival of cinema, photography and new media Panoràmic (Barcelona/Granollers). Since 2017 she has been co-curator of the contemporary art cycle Santcorneliarts, in the Chapel of Sant Corneli, Museum of Cardedeu.