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Azucena Vieites. Tableau vivant (19/03/2013)

March 19 – July 22, 2013 / Main site

“Taking up the work of other people allows you a kind of contact even at a distance, a genealogy, a form of complicity and knowledge.” These are the terms in which Azucena Vieites (Hernani, 1967) speaks of a work that consists of approaching contemporary visual culture by means of strategies like citation, appropriation, inverventions centered on the idea of the original and the copy, processes of resignification, and the feminist thought and gender politics associated with subcultures. Her oeuvre might be considered a kind of DIY remix that attempts to represent a memory in relation to a present time and to an experience of passage, a memory whose intensity will gradually fade.

In Tableau vivant, Azucena Vieites lays out a series of silkscreen prints based on pre-existing images, along with a series of drawings by the artist that were colored in by the participants in Coloring Book, a children’s workshop held prior to the opening of the exhibition. Also included are a video piece and a series of projections, the artist’s first incursion in this field, which enter into a dialogue with the other two series. Seen here to be of major importance in her production are multiplicity, fragmentation and repetition as means of breaking away from the absolute image and linear narrative forms, and central too is the ephemeral and processual nature of her work. The title, Tableau vivant, alludes to painting, to certain forms of dance, and to an idea of “frozen” representation in a setting or framework where a group of characters pose, recreate, simulate an event or a scene. Other aspects of such a work include the idea of entertainment, that of mixture, and the construction of a visual iconography where pleasure, excess and fantasy are implicit. The artist is interested in the tableau vivant as a way of acting and thinking that relates back to a technique used by filmmakers like Ulrike Ottinger, whose work she acknowledges.

 

For further information, download Press release Azucena Vieites. Tableau vivant