Espacio P was founded back in 1981 in a ground floor premises at number 11, Calle Núñez de Arce, in the centre of Madrid, near Plaza Santa Ana. During its first year it was used for rehearsals and workshops in all kinds of practices related with the body, like corporal expression, performance and dance
Since museums first came into existence back in the eighteenth century, there has been a tradition of exhibiting that consists in showing sculptures in central courtyards and lobbies, allowing various fragments from the history of art to coexist in the same space, as part of a stage setting designed to be viewed by a comparative gaze.
A Choreographed Exhibition consists solely of movements. It showcases works choreographed for the exhibition by international artists, choreographers and musicians.
Elements of Vogue. A case study of radical performance is the first exhibition that reviews the history of Afro-American performance in Spain and the first internationally on the history of voguing. The exhibition takes voguing, a popular Afro-Latin and queer dance, as a case study to understand the emergence of the pose as a form of resistance and its ability to articulate new social formations.
Julia Spínola (Madrid, 1979) develops her practice across the fields of sculpture and drawing. In her works, the continuous references to text and to performance give rise to systems of correspondences that operate as approximations to a single theme based on the relations set in place between figures, objects and movements.
tono lengua boca brings together a major part of the moving image production by Wendelien van Oldenborgh (Rotterdam, Netherlands, 1962) for the first international retrospective of her work. In three juxtaposed words the title disassembles the elements that together would configure a voice. The tone, recognisable from afar but yet without semantic content; the tongue, a visceral organ but also a political-linguistic construct, and the mouth the location of embodied enunciation.
The work of Jochen Lempert (Germany, 1958) engages with photography from the optic of research and visuality, very often with the intention of questioning the criteria behind a search for the truth and the models that shape the world.
Archivo F.X by the artist Pedro G. Romero (Huelva, 1964) is a collection of documentation “in construction”, comprising more than one thousand images and files that are, on one hand, an archive of images of anticlerical political iconoclasm in Spain and also, on the other, and cast under the same light, a mirror held up to the radical projects of the modern vanguard from Malevich to Rothko, from Dada to the Situationists.
As always, we are caught between desire and appearances, between the wanting and seeming of a Spanish night that does not allow us to see fully. Between the legacy of our historical nostalgia and the present of our histrionic moment, it is in the baroque, in brownish-grey, in oiliness, where we will find ways to negotiate with a painful and elusive tradition.
Among the various artistic interventions contingent on the exercises in architectural acupuncture begun in autumn 2016 at CA2M, Dora García has conceived an exhibition which takes the form of new signage in a permanent intervention that involves all the art centre’s various spaces.