BARCELONA, SPAIN.- Scenarios is the title of the new programme of contemporary creation that "la Caixa" Community Projects presents in the Espai Montcada of CaixaForum and which Alejandro Vidal will initiate with one of his remarkable video installations. In all, four artists will be presented in a chain of exhibitions throughout the season, staging differing ways of experiencing our surroundings: Vidal (Palma de Majorca, 1972), Johanna Billing (Stockholm, 1973), Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland, 1972) and David Altmejd (Canada, 1974). The common nexus in Scenarios, curated by Sílvia Sauquet, is the head-spinning transformation our society undergoes from one day to the next – changes in our way of life, our relationships with others and with that which surrounds us.

Gangsters, urban excesses and a great deal of money at stake. A former Hollywood of the East, Hong Kong is a hostile city, a land of extremes and one of the most important economic centres in Asia. Fiction and reality go hand in hand in this former Mecca of cinema, which has managed to develop a peculiar film genre of its own. Fiction and reality also mingle in the video installation Material Dust, in which the artist Alejandro Vidal appropriates scenes from other creators' films shot in Hong Kong to mix them with his own dramatizations staged in the streets of that same city.

The Scenarios series, curated by Sílvia Sauquet, consists of four exhibitions which may be seen in CaixaForum's Espai Montcada (av. del Marquès de Comillas, 6-8, Barcelona) throughout the 2006-2007 Season. Alejandro Vidal will open the series with Material Dust, from 11 October to 31 December 2006. Following this, work will subsequently be presented by Johanna Billing (from mid-January to mid-March 2007), Wilhelm Sasnal (from the end of March to mid-June 2007) and David Altmejd (from mid-June to early September 2007).

Scenarios is made up of four different dramatizations, four excursions into reality, four editions that are in some cases comedies, dramas in others, and even include suspense stories. The four artists in the series belong to the same generation and all share the same constant – they delve into the systems that make up our society, and use art as a stage through which to present their own lives.

The work of Johanna Billing addresses relationships with others, her videos reflecting a feeling of melancholy towards changing societies. Wilhelm Sasnal paints images to be preserved in the memory. David Altmejd takes distance and invents fictitious stories that make the imagination fly. Finally, Alejandro Vidal adopts a more critical approach to our attitudes in life.

"We live in the culture of suspicion. To be an artist today is more an attitude than a profession," complains Vidal. "I understand artistic practice as a commitment difficult to separate from a critical attitude intended to transform. To this end it is sometimes necessary to transgress and even adopt a political position if appropriate", he concludes.

Vidal has produced Material Dust, a new video filmed in the city of Hong Kong, for CaixaForum's Espai Montcada. Attracted by the world of film, the artist chose this city because it was once considered a Hollywood of the East, but also because it is a city of urban excesses, significant financial movement and a high level of criminality. In short, a city in which reality and fiction go hand in hand.

He also mixes reality and fiction in Material Dust. Vidal examined film shot by others and filmed pieces himself to insert them later into his own work. Simultaneously and following his usual line of work, he staged scenes in the streets of Hong Kong. "I use what others stage-produce and incorporate it into my own scenario." The end product is a suspense film, but one in which film codes have been deconstructed.

"I work with a non-linear narrative," Vidal says, and the result is a fictitious work with differing levels of reading. "One of my intentions when addressing this project was the theft of the filmed image, in other words, to appropriate already recorded scenes in order to include them in my own film. The material shot simultaneously in the city of Hong Kong is also converted into fiction; a fiction that we could qualify as site-specific. It therefore proves complicated to define exactly where the fiction begins and the real ends. Even in documentary film, we are presented with a fictionised reality. Art is never innocent and the view through a camera cannot be neutral," Vidal explains. The artist is an observer of all that surrounds him, and like an explorer, sets out to capture experiences that dramatise his work. As Vidal says, "The final work is nothing more than a pretext for this journey."

Alejandro Vidal (Palma de Majorca, 1972, currently living in Barcelona). The work of Alejandro Vidal employs formats including video, photography, drawing and installation to address the stage production of DJ culture, punk music and urban tribes. His examination is not into the representation of violence but rather into its deconstruction. We find the codes he uses in advertising, the communications media and film, and the image remits us to the ideological context of those cultures and communities. Vidal investigates the social, political and economic implications of contemporary art and takes a critical look at the way in which marketing and politics deform our attitudes in day-to-day life. In his works we encounter subjects such as social conflict, activism, violence and non-communication, in an exercise which examines society's state of mind.

Johanna Billing (Stockholm, 1973) - Johanna Billing's work is a constant investigation into the systems that make up our society. Her videos unfailingly reflect a sensation of melancholy and loss, of a representation of changing societies and the feelings contained in people's relationships. She poses questions about how we live our lives and whether we freely choose to live them that way. She refers in her videos to our relationships with others within youth culture, pop music and the political idealism of the 1960s and 70s.

Wilhelm Sasnal (Poland, 1972) - Sasnal studied architecture and painting and has worked with a variety of mediums including drawing (in comics), film, photography and finally, painting, often based on photographs. His photography-based paintings are narrations of history or of his own personal life because, as he himself observes, "Life tends to write the best scripts." His painting encompasses a broad style, as do his sources of inspiration – pop, photorealism, informalism, minimalism and gestural abstraction. The subject matter of his painting is also varied – architectural structures, organic shapes, plants, portraits, photograms from Polish film, and book covers, among others.

David Altmejd (Canada, 1974, currently living in New York) Altmejd's sculptures explore notions of attraction and rejection. His pieces are huge constructions composed of human or animal limbs, enormous wolf-man heads and structures made from mirrors, like scenes from a horror film. He also constructs buildings or rooms reminiscent of modernist architecture in which we can find flowers and fake birds among other ingredients. These constructions can be both horrifying and highly vociferous at the same time. David Altmejd's grotesque works are the fruit of imagination, of the subconscious. Their conceptual link is his aspiration to be an author of mythology, creating fictitious narrations and stories that he makes no attempt to explain, providing them instead as a framework on which we can choose our own adventure. He employs a highly personal symbology reminiscent in many ways of that of Mathew Barney.