BARCELONA.- Prats Nogueras Blanchard will open its space in Barcelona on April 6, 2024 with an exhibition by Muntadas.
The exhibition titled PARATOPIAS presents projects carried out at various times and contexts. The works are gathered around the word paratopia, a conceptual term defined by the linguist Dominique Maingueneau and used by Muntadas.
Dominique Maingueneau writes: “Art is an activity that can only be practiced at the cost of paratopia, the impossibility of belonging to a place, a community, a time or a language. To find one's place in the paratopic space of Art, one must renounce the possibility of fully occupying any place whatsoever. This impossibility of belonging is not something imposed on artists: it's something they work out through their creations. They must construct, in the same movement, their works and the paratopia that makes these works possible. They have no other way out than to devote themselves to an endless work in a life without place.” The exhibition presents a cross-section of Muntadas' career from the 70's to the present, with new works produced especially for this occasion. The show on view in the new gallery on carrer Méndez Núñez 14, will extend to the Poblenou space, Passatge Saladrigas 5, where 3 of Muntadas’ video projections / installations will be installed in a storage warehouse.
With this project, Muntadas continues his reflections about space, not only understood as physical space but also as a space of use. Through videos, photographs, archival material and sound installation, the artist is interested in topics such as belonging to a place, the occupation of public space, displacement or the mechanisms of power, among others.
On the occasion of the exhibition, the gallery is publishing a publication in the form of a newspaper with texts by Eugeni Bonet and Victoria Sacco. The publication of 500 copies brings together all the works present in the exhibition and is designed by Teresa Mulet and printed by Gràfiques Martí.
Muntadas, born in Barcelona and living in New York since 1971, started working with installation in the mid-seventies, and he has continued to work with photography, video, installation, audio recording, and urban interventions. Iterations of his iconic projects —such as Between the Frames: The Forum (1983–93), The Board Room (1988), and the on-going series On Translation (1995– … ) and The Construction of Fear (2008– … )— have been widely exhibited at institutions and galleries in North and South America, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Muntadas participated in the 1977 and 1997 editions of Documenta, the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the 1983 São Paulo Biennial, the 2000 Havana Biennial, the 2002 Taipei Biennial, the 2004 Kwangju Biennial, the 2011 and 2021 Istanbul Biennial, and the 2012 Paris Triennale. In 2005 he represented Spain at the Venice Biennale, where he realized a comprehensive project on the evolution of the Biennale over its history. His works have been presented in solo exhibitions at MACBA, Barcelona; Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Mexico City; Weserburg Museum, Bremen; Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Buenos Aires; MNCARS, Madrid, with the show Entre/Between; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; and Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo. Since 2011 he has been working on the project Asian Protocols, presented to the public at Total Museum of Seoul (2014), at 3331 Arts Chiyoda of Tokyo (2016) and at Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing (2018). In 2021, he presented the individual exhibition La ciudad vacía at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao and participated in the 13th Shanghai Biennial. In 2022, he has presented Exercises On Past And Present, Memories, at Centro Andaluz de Arte Conteporáneo en Sevilla, and in 2023, at the Ateneo Art Gallery in Manila.
