Activities, exhibitions and projects

Image: Clara Montoya, Fulgur Conditum, 2015-2016

The relationships between events, fictional accounts, and scientific and conceptual challenges form the backbone of her artistic projects and the exhibition Proxima Centauri b gathers a few of them in an anthology of stories that traverse very diverse eras, communities and locations. From the distant exoplanet for which this exhibition is named, we present a tour that brings us closer to the artistic interventions that Montoya has produced in remote locales, approaching pieces that tell stories of other ages and territories, and closing with a story of the present, of community, now.

The exhibition begins with three devices that introduce a selection of works which Clara Montoya has produced in remote locations: Fulgur conditum, a mechanism built in South Africa that awaits a lightning strike in order to create a fulgurite rock; 1924/2124, an analog measuring device installed in the countryside on the island of Mallorca that records the growing distance between the Moon and Earth over the time frame indicated in its title; and MorseRoma RAER, an encoded message that is emitted every evening from the Spanish Academy in Rome to its host city. The Five Pleiades and TÚ are works that connect us to past histories through their formal presentation in the exhibition space that we observe from our present state. The work Carnaval sauvage opens the final chapter of the Proxima Centauri b program. After the temporal-spatial journeys, this series of paintings maintains a clearly contemporary focus. The representation of these characters combines tradition with the contemporary, generating impressions of an unknown time in which we can imagine multiple histories, ways of life, desires and fears. The installation Speak to me, the work that closes the exhibition, brings us into the present, it is a piece that only functions through direct experience, that depends upon the sporadic creation of a chorus of heartbeats.

Text by Manuela Pedrón Nicolau and Jaime González Cela
Translation by Nicholas Wood