Reconstructing Antoni Muntadas, the nomadic artist of communication and censorship

The exhibition involves the reconstruction of an outline of his career, with works dated from 1973 to 2024, and in various cities and places, since the movement, travel and not static permanenceare determining features of their sensitivity.

In the gallery premises, twelve installations have been brought together, of various formats and supports: videos, photographs, archival materials and an audio CD, with which we can appreciate the intense multimedia character of Muntadas’ artistic work, always in line with an observational and critical dialogue with the various forms of communication and representation that characterize this “image world” in which we live.

[Antoni Muntadas: “No soy un gourmet cultural, prefiero que hablen mis obras”]

The core and concept of the exhibition is located in its title: Paratopiaschosen by Muntadas based on the approaches of the French linguist Dominique Maingueneau, who characterizes art as “an activity that can be practiced at the expense of paratopia, of an impossible belonging to a place, to a community, to a time, or to a language.”

This conception places art in a weightless space, in a non-place, something decisive in everything that Muntadas has built in his creative career, through travel, translation and the open location of life in changing spaces.

The starting point is located on a small black rug on the floor, on which the question is printed in Catalan…ON ARE YOU GOING? (…where are you going?) (2024). This is a recovery for this exhibition of what Muntadas proposed in a project between 1989 and 1999 with 12 carpets that referred to the flag of the European Union with the currencies of the 12 nations, which asked where the coalition was headed.

All the other installations are situated in a coming and going from one place to another, from the open to the closed, from translation as a means of exchange, from the difference between house and home, from reflections on life and death, of visualization and concealment of the politicaluntil reaching the culmination of the large format installation KEEP MOVING (Keep Moving) (2024).

[Así llegó Eusebio Sempere a la abstracción geométrica: un artista en los márgenes]

This piece is configured with four vertical planes. From left to right we see a white oscillating line on a blue background, a set of printed notes with information on airplane safety procedures, a printed image of an electrocardiogram, and a collage with fragments of various maps.

Everything we see has direct, autobiographical references, to Antoni Muntadas himself. And its axis would be the idea of ​​continuous displacement, so fundamental in all of his artistic proposals.

Ese complejo e intenso conjunto expositivo se complementa con lo que encontramos en el espacio-almacén situado en Poble Nou, donde se presentan tres instalaciones de vídeo: La siesta (1995), Alphaville e outros (2011) e In Girum Revisited (2017). Los vídeos fluyen como diálogos con las imágenes fílmicas de Joris Ivens, Jean-Luc Godard y Guy Debord, respectivamente.

La diversidad idiomática de sus títulos es todo un registro de la diversidad de ambientes de vida de Muntadas, siempre a través del viaje. En La siesta se proyecta una frase intensamente ligada al conjunto y criterio de la propuesta: “una obra de arte es siempre autobiográfica”.

[Catalanismo, marxismo y poesía se cruzan en las cartas entre Antoni Tàpies y Joan Brossa]

In Alphaville and others The dialogue with Godard is confronted with promotional speeches from a São Paulo neighborhood, conceived as urban propaganda, and thus underlines “the difference between inhabiting and living.

Definitely, autobiographical synthesis and quite a journeyusing the various representations of the non-place that Muntadas represents and makes speak through the images, mirrors of life, that make up his works.