Activities
Ikuspuntuak. Ellas
8 women artists in front of works in the museum´s collection by women artists, from the sixteenth century until today.
Ikuspuntuak is an innovative project to dismantle the usual codes of viewing art in order to foster a free, subjective interpretation of the museum's collection.
"Ellas is the second edition and takes shape in 8 audiovisual pieces where the possible existence of a genealogy that gives unity to the work of women artists and the different positions on referents and influences that serve as a point of departure and generator of artistic production are the common threads.
Dates:
2023-02-28 2023-12-31
Language:
Spanish (with subtitles in basque and english)
Place:
Digital project. Museum´s webpage and Youtube channel
For whom:
General
- Film and video
- Digital & Multimedia
Organizer/s:
The academicist vision has often prevailed over other ways of seeing and understanding art. With this idea as the point of departure, the Department of Education and Cultural Action has worked in conjunction with the filmmaker Tamara García Iglesias (Lasarte, Gipuzkoa, 1978).
In this new season, Ikuspuntuak. Ellas, is offering a new series of eight audiovisual episodes, this time feature another eight women artists who are currently starting or continuing their careers.
This project places them in front of works in the museum’s collection by women artists, now deceased, from the sixteenth century until today. They show their influences and reveal their artistic genealogies, from feminist literature in the case of Estibaliz Sádaba to pattern books or television for Maider Aldasoro. These references create ‘mental maps that inform work journals’, as Mabi Revuelta states.
Based on the particularity of their work, professionalism and knowledge of the medium, and on the sisterhood among women artists, “Ellas” connects and constructs its own script with the works of the women artists, some of whom have been forgotten, while others have been confused with muses.
Each of the eight episodes has two parts: first, it offers a documentary record in which the guest artist explores the imaginary of the museum’s other artists with the projection of the work onto her body, and secondly, it offers a conversation on the work and the interest, influence, questioning or differences between both artists. In this way, Ikuspuntuak. Ellas proposes its own inspiring narration to delve into the world of creation from the standpoint of women. Each video lasts around 12 minutes and is recorded with a single camera with live sound and this time without narration.
Direction: Tamara García Iglesias
Coordination: Maria Victoria Antoñanzas and César Ochoa. Department of Education and Cultural Action (DEAC)
Estibaliz Sádaba | Artist (Bilbao, Bizkaia, 1963)
Mabi Revuelta | Artist (Bilbao, 1967)
Elena Goñi | Artist (Pamplona, 1968)
Maider Aldasoro | Artist (México, 1992)
Malús Arbide | Artist (San Sebastián, 1958)
Bego Antón | Artist (Bilbao, 1983)
Amaya Suberviola | Artist (Mendavia, Navarra, 1993)
Lorea Alfaro | Artist (Estella, Navarra, 1982).
Others. Looking at other women, at “Ellas”. Actions to feel relieved, spurred or accompanied. Women as a refuge, as a home to start from, to continue or to abandon. Others as a life reference. Reading about other women artists, without a present body, about what they did, what they were unable to do, what what they did then means now. Their company.
In his 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Harold Bloom lists the problems of overcoming the anxiety that men authors aspiring to write face. This anxiety is based on the existence of other previous literary works which they feel compelled to outdo. He concludes that men artists need to ‘kill their father’ in order to become unique, geniuses, artists.
In response to this theory of creativity, which has a clear Freudian influence and is deeply rooted in the male mindset, in 1979 two writers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, published The Madwoman in the Attic, where, instead of experiencing this influence with anguish and anxiety, they prioritise the need to couple their work with an existing genealogy to give it legitimacy and place through a survey of Victorian literature. These are two very different ways of understanding the creative act: the need for what came earlier in order to keep narrating, and the need to begin with a blank page.
– Tamara García Iglesias
Chapters | Ikuspuntuak. Ellas:
Ellas I: Estibaliz Sádaba with Mary Cassatt
Seated Woman with a Child in Her Arms, c.1890
With Estibaliz Sádaba, we examine the domestic and domesticating interiors in the figure of Mary Cassatt, where the structure of the home is imprinted on the bodies of both, binding their female figures to rooms indoors.
Ellas II: Mabi Revuelta with Maria Helena Vieira da Silva
Passage des miroirs (Passage of Mirrors), 1981
Mabi Revuelta and Viera da Silva wend their way through the labyrinths built to provide refuge yet feel distressed, to create infinite places, real chess games, in which feeling runs parallel much closer than we may think.
Ellas III: Elena Goñi with Isabel Baquedano
Untitled, c.1972
With Goñi we examine the settings and figures in Baquedano’s painting, where an image seems to be projected on an interior figure which, just like Goñi’s figures, seems to be suspended in a minimal reality represented by piece of fabric or a pose.
Ellas IV: Maider Aldasoro with Sofonisba Anguissola
The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, 1588
Aldasoro focuses on Anguissola’s fabrics and theatricality, and on how she arranges the figures in a scene, just as she does in one of her videos showing insect choreographies.
Ellas V: Malús Arbide with Sonia Delaunay
Costume pour Gaby, 1918
Arbide takes a steady gaze at Delaunay’s drawing, its front and back, in what seems like the composition of a costume for a play, where the mobility of the fabric inspires us about the way of getting around in circles until reaching repeated yet different patterns, like a choreography that never ends up the same even though we repeat it.
Ellas VI: Bego Antón with Rosa Bonheur
Chamois Lying Down, c.1890–1899
Antón takes us to the crystalline eye of Bonheur’s ibex, towards that eye that makes an animal’s gaze human, and in it she finds the reason for talking to us about how references work for her and her personal relationship with the animal world.
Ellas VII: Amaya Suberviola with Mari Paz Jiménez
Plastic Organic Nucleus, c.1971
Suberviola separates her work from Jiménez’s and in that separation, which ranges from the life process and the production of her work by layers, we find a current way of thinking and doing, when the reference does not challenge you.
Ellas VIII: Lorea Alfaro with María Blanchard
Femme assise (Seated Woman), c.1928
Alfaro pays attention to the undefined places in Blanchard’s work, where the author smudges before speaking to create spaces, folds and intersections that are almost as important as the self-assured brushstroke. Alfaro, accompanied by Isabel de Naverán, outlines what a reference is to her, here and now, when the reference is affects and affects are references.
