Geometry, fine arts and politics converge in cartography.
Unfortunately, it is not a virtuous meeting, but a gathering of cheats: some interests disguise themselves as others to make the beautiful pass for the true, the interested in the real.
"If a cartographer tells you that he is neutral, distrust him", writes Juan Mayorga in
The cartographer
.
“If he tells you he's neutral, you know which side he's on.
A map always takes sides.
(…) Maps that they exhibit to scare and secret maps that they never show.
New maps full of delusions and old maps that they will wield to call for war.
How many catastrophes have started on a map!
Good times for the cartographer, difficult times for humanity ”.
More information
When a tomato grater becomes a torture device or a screen
There are many maps that we find in the exhibition that, until September 12, the IVAM dedicates to Mona Hatoum (Beirut, 69 years old) on the occasion of the Julio González Prize, a biennial award granted by the Generalitat Valenciana. Through them, the artist reveals her concern about border problems, armed conflicts, the harsh validity of Eurocentrism or the foreseeable calamities that climate change will bring us. These are formalized works with great communicative efficiency, so that the viewer receives the message (at least part of it) in a very direct way: a planisphere made up of transparent glass marbles, which any carelessness could scatter around the room; a map made up of bars of soap that would easily fall apart if it came into contact with something wet; other,unwoven into a carpet, the threads of which have been carefully pulled out to draw the emptiness of the continents ...
The artist reveals her concern about border problems and the calamities of climate change
These attempts to weaken the world map persistently remind us of an essential truth: that all maps are false and that the world is not as we have been taught.
In other words, that this abstraction of the contours of the earth and the oceans and these pictograms that mean "border", "mountain range" or "river" are simple stratagems to define reality in the way that suits the hegemonic power of each moment .
Things exist as long as they are named and that also affects the shape of the planet and the boundaries of nations.
A resounding and allegorical installation opens the exhibition,
Bunker
(2011) which is made up of several stacks of steel tubes that come together to form an urban silhouette. The material has been attacked with a violence capable of denting and piercing it, so the visitor has the impression of moving between the blackened buildings of a bombed and besieged city. This unpleasant hall gives way to a spacious room, glazed on one side, in which pieces produced during the last two decades are loosely distributed and coexist, badly, with the ugly brown pavement that the Valencian center has.
The works with cartographic references already mentioned, the bulk of the rest plays with the dissonance that occurs between the objects they represent and the materials that compose them.
For example, in
Paraíso interior
(2008), we find a bed whose bed base is made of barbed wire.
Something similar happens in
Still life (medicine
cabinet
)
(2012), in which a medical cabinet exhibits Murano glass hand grenades, or in
Screen
and
Sofa-bed,
both from 2008, where these household items take the form of graters of kitchen.
A parapet that attacks, a resting place that destroys you.
'Bunker' (2011), work by Mona Hatoum exhibited at the IVAM.
MIGUEL LORENZO
The problem with Mona Hatoum's works is that while they may be beautiful, like the floating barbed wire cube
Impenetrable
from 2009, they are harmless. One would hope that a work that emerged from such "political" approaches would like to go a step beyond mere rhetoric. Obviating that all art is, in effect, political, whoever calls himself in this way is used to shooting against very complex conflicts, using the wet gunpowder available to the arts. I do not know of any painting that has overthrown a tyranny, nor of any symphony that has improved the lives of the oppressed. A globe of steel and sizzling red neons
(Hot
spot
,
2013) will seem, at best, imposing or ingenious, but its ability to interfere with the course of history ends there. Putting it briefly, the artist's work is loaded with admirable and pertinent concerns and with almost always intelligent formalizations, but nothing more. The piece
You are still here
(2013), a mirror where “YOU ARE STILL HERE” has been laser engraved and hung at eye level so that the viewer can see their reflection with the overprinted text, is a clear example of this. It does not provide new information (one usually already knows that one is going to die), nor does it subtract a drop of anguish from death.
I remember that Ángel González once answered that he was not interested in “denunciation” art because it reminded the outcasts of the earth of an oppression that they already knew, while depriving them of some works that could serve them of some spiritual benefit.
I would like to adhere to this opinion.
Someone who really wants to change the state of things will surely have much more appropriate instruments than those provided by artistic practices.
More so when the natural destination of these works is the flooring of a museum, the walls of a gallery or a collector's room.
I fear that in none of these locations will be the tinderbox in which the next revolution will explode.
'Mona Hatoum'.
IVAM.
Valencia.
Until September 12.
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