Landscape, communication and processes
Dance is used as a form of both personal communication (the process involving the creation of a dancer or a choreographer) and group communication (local dances as an element for shaping the identity or oral heritage of a people) via the concept of "landscape." It transmits feelings and emotions and shapes an aesthetic. It forms part of culture and as such boasts a series of qualities both from the educational and pedagogic standpoint.

The exhibition will take place on the first floor of the Huarte Centre, although it is expected to become incorporated into the other exhibitions: dance-performance-installations (second floor) and the dance documentation centre (third floor). This is therefore a project that overlaps with the subject matter of the upcoming exhibition period at the Huarte Centre: the moving arts.

Commissioned by Xavier Rovira from LiquidDocs, it approaches the world of creations, trajectories, work and the process involving choreographers, performers and playwrights, opening up a hitherto unheard-of and enriching dialogue between them and the public.

The exhibition-installation has been created especially for Huarte from previous work going back over three years and of which it has so far only been possible to see a part at the Museu de L´Ampurdá in Figueras.

In this way, the installations are created specifically for the Huarte Centre with the aim of ensuring that their growth and development continue within the exhibition site itself as part of a constant interactive process with the public. A distinguishing feature is that the physical and conceptual relationship with visitors moves on different levels: on a general level, on a pedagogic level geared towards school-age members of the public, and on a specialist level geared towards professionals and artists from the world of dance, performance and the performing arts.

Moreover, the contact between people who visit the Centre will transcend the limits imposed by the exhibition area by the chance to capture their experience online in real time via mobile devices.

And it will enable Huarte to become transformed into the launching platform for the Virtual network liquidMaps on a European level: the first online project for the access and inclusion of immediate contents destined for creation in the moving arts. Following its setting in motion and launching here, it will then move on in June to the Reina Sofía Centre.

Doing and (un)doing is, as its name suggests, an active process which is constantly changing and mutating throughout its life in Huarte, and which provides the public with a means to take an existential approach to the performing arts as an essential element in contemporary culture.

An exhibition in action, and a challenge: as choreographers, performers, interpreters and playwrights, they are not only capable of revealing and engaging in dialogue with their creative process, but also of extending that creative effort towards physical elements common to the plastic arts, purely analogical and bodily elements and digital interaction, etc. - thus showing that contemporary culture knows no borders, neither between different disciplines, nor between artists and the public.

Organised by: The Government of Navarre and the State Society forCultural Commemorations (SECC)

Onthe occasion of the Bicentenary of the War of Independence, the State Societyfor Cultural Commemorations (SECC), with the co-ordination of the Ministry ofCulture and the Government of Navarre, have organised an exhibition entitledLIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. For this exhibition, 15 Spanish, 14 French and 2Portuguese artists have each been invited to present a work which reflects the developmentstatus of these three ideals of coexistence in today's society, ideals whichcan be traced back to the French Revolution of 1789.

Bernard Marcadé, for France, and Isabel Durán, for Spain, are the curatorsof this exhibition which is showing at the Huarte Contemporary Art Centre and whichbrings together works from the following artists: Antoni Abad, Jean-MichelAlberola, Elisabeth Ballet, Christian Boltanski, José Manuel Broto, Jean-MarcBustamante, Daniel Canogar, Rui Chafes, Chema Cobo, Ninar Esber, JoanFontcuberta, Luis Gordillo, Cristina Iglesias, Cristina Lucas, AnnetteMessager, François Morellet, Jean-Luc Moulène, Antoni Muntadas, FrancisNaranjo, Marina Núñez, Bruno Peinado, Gonçalo Pena, Jaume Plensa, BernardíRoig, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Alain Séchas, Bruno Serralongue, Niele Toroni,Tatiana Trouvé, Eulàlia Valldosera and Yan Pei-Ming. As an added bonus,Dionisio Cañas and Carlos Edmundo de Ory are also to be present at theexhibition with some of their poems.

 LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY (LEF) is a reflection on the current statusof these three ideals of coexistence, using a medium which most contributes tohuman enrichment: art.

 France and Spain, Spain and France, former enemies, now brothers. Theparticipation of the two Portuguese artists in the exhibition represents aslight deviation, a necessary correction to history, given the fact thatPortugal has been and always will be a brother country, then and now.

Patxi Alda exhibits a project based on the concept of the Genome as an artistic research process. Using this conceptual development as a point of departure, his works approaches landscape and its representation from a sensorial and abstract perspective.

In his search for material expression, the artist uses audiovisual elements to narrate his own experience in the landscape which he reproduces.

Physical, three-dimensional components -sculptures-, sound and projections share the exhibition space. The falsely organic, details of decay converted into beauty, things as intangible as the wind captured in numerical form by digital technology...

The landscape as an intensely human cultural construction as opposed to the myth of the wild, the extraneous, the natural.

Exhibition held under the Government of Navarra's Art Creation Grant Programme.

Wool, crotchet, fluid structures, almost nets, which do not catch light, but rather distort it... With her organic work, in which both the natural and the social are constructed, this Pamplona-born artist toys with female archetypes from a material standpoint in order to transcend and universalise them.

Exhibition held under the Government of Navarra's Art Creation Grant Programme.

Unidentified Object is as a working process. The project comes from the search for a plastic proposal for a concrete space, which is the outside mesh of the Contemporary Art Centre Huarte.

The working process is organized around the construction of a visible element coming from the formal destruction of an object. The scourers of stainless steel are the element-object available as object-material.

Maite Vélaz Sancha, born in 1976 and graduated in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country, has had various individual exhibitions such as On Tiptoes (Installations) in the exhibition hall El Pasillo (2004) and Miss Little Things (Installations and Objects )in the culture centre in Tafalla (2003) together with numerous collective exhibitions and workshops. In 2005 she obtained a grant-workshop in Landscape in White from the Autonomous Community of Murcia. In 2004 she won third prize on the Biennial of Sports and Art.

© Maite Vélaz Sancha

© Maite Vélaz Sancha

Tied or abused, naked or covered in paint, still or twitching, the body is present in all possible situations. The artists ¨live¨ their own art, continuing the long tradition of self-portrait and employ themselves to break the accepted norms of identity. This is the proposal of I Am Making Art, a large retrospective about the performance and the use of the body as work material. The exhibition enables us to rediscover the acts of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Fabrice Gygi, Sigalit Landau, Grace Ndiritu, Hayley Newman, Yoko Ono, Adrian Piper and Salla Tykkä; whose work was recorded in their times. This is the first opportunity in Spain to see many of these acts that marked the evolution of an art that thanks to the use of media of reproduction is not ephemeral any more.

The exhibition has been produced by the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève and in the Contemporary Art Centre Huarte is organized by Katya Garcia-Anton.

The exhibition is organized in two blocks: the first part will be exhibited in the Contemporary Art Centre Huarte from 1 November to 14 December 2008 in two chapters at the same time: Ritual, Transgression, Resistance, Risk and Process, Duration, Repetition. The second part will start on 16 December and will be shown until 1 February 2009 in two chapters: Identity and Transformation and Feminism. The title I Am Making Art comes from a video work by John Baldessari (1971) in which with a humorous tone he refers to those artists who explored the use of their own bodies and gestures as an artistic tool at the end of the 1960s, beginning of the 1970s.

Four studies divided into two blocks.

This project consists of four studies or thematic chapters that will be exhibited in two blocks of two chapters each. From 1 November to 14 January the audience can see Ritual, Transgression, Resistance, Risk that deals with breaking taboos and rejecting psychic or moral limits .The second chapter, Process, Duration, Repetition, deals with the repetition of simple actions as a means of giving them a new meaning.

From 16 December the exhibition will be renewed with other two studies. In the third chapter Identity and Transformation, the artists explore their relationships with themselves and with the outer world: with the audience, playing with the mask, the show and the look. Finally, we can find the last chapter entitled Feminism that depicts the changes of artistic activities of the 1960s and 70s in a crucial moment. In this period, female artists had the opportunity to find a new voice, a different way to believe that offered them a visibility never known before.

The exhibition is supported by: Clinique de Genolier; Ville de Genève, Département des affaires culturelles; Banque Julius Baer & Cie S.A., Genève; Enigma; Exane; Fassbind; Federal Express; Firmenich S.A.; Fondation Ernst Göhner; Fondation Fluxum; JTI ; Loterie Romande; Melina Press; Merrill Lynch Bank (Suisse) S.A. and Pour-cent culturel Migros.

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Some of the videos on show:

© Gilbert & George. 'The Singing Sculpture', 1968-1991. Video. 20'36. Courtesy: Raul Goñi.

© Yoko Ono. 'Cut Piece', 1965. Video. 9'. Courtesy of the artist.

©  Courtesy: Raul Goñi.

© Lin Yilin. 'Safely Manoeuvred', 1995. Video. 17'. Courtesy of the artist.

©  Courtesy: Raul Goñi.

©  Courtesy: Raul Goñi.

© Zineb Sedira. 'Autobiographical Patterns', 1996. Video. 9'. Courtesy of the artist.

© Patty Chang. 'Melons (at a loss)', 1998. Video. 3' 48''. Courtesy of the artist.

© Martha Rosler. 'Semiotics of the Kitchen', 1975. Video. 5' 29''. Courtesy VDB.

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Thousands is a large multidisciplinary project in which photography, performance and video is joined together to enter the world of historical storytelling, family sagas, the creation of identity, and from a poetical perspective, the idea of soul transfer.

The initiative comes from the author's surname, Chun, less common in Korea, whose Chinese origin and legendary history has intrigued the author since his childhood. Chun Man Ri (Quian Wan Li pronounced in Chinese) was a famous Chinese general from the
Ming dynasty who came to Korea in 1592 to support the Korean Joseon dynasty and was the first to use the surname Chun (literarily Thousands) given by the author's mother who had dreamt that his son left for another country. Traditionally, both the Chinese and the Korean believe that one's name determines their destiny. It is a mystery why the general decided to stay in Korea despite the glory and honor that awaited him in China.

406 years later, inspired by his fascination and the desire to investigate those elements that create one's identity and modify it into a more open, flexible and mobile world, Kyungwoo Chun decided to work with people who share the same surname and who live in the three villages near Zhegzhou in China.

The project consists of a portrait of thousand people whose surname is Chun entitled One Thousand Faces of Thousands; an artistic reconstruction of the life of General Chun Man Li The General in 49 Minutes and a video called The Red Book.

The Contemporary Art Centre Huarte is the first centre to host this ambitious project by one of the key figures of contemporary Korean visual arts. After its presentation and exhibition in the Art Centre Huarte in Spain; the project will be transferred to Korea and Germany.

In addition, Kyungwoo Chun is setting out a unique act that involves the cooperation of thousand people from Spain. Under the title ¨The Weight of Pain¨ the artist will address a thousand participants to insert their most intimate and personal pain in the form of stones into a red handkerchief.

The process is simple: each person is provided (by the Art Centre Huarte) with a red handkerchief. They write their names, date and place of birth on the outer part of the handkerchief. Inside, the participants can put as many stones as they wish representing the weight of their current sufferings. Once it is done, the four corners of the handkerchief are tied together by a central knot.

The idea of the project is to promote the participation of the audience as an artist in the exhibition. The only requirement is honesty as the participants are to gauge the weight of their own pain. All the sample handkerchiefs will be exhibited as part of the project Thousands.

© Kyungwoo Chun.

© Kyungwoo Chun.

© Kyungwoo Chun. Image: courtesy Raul Goñi.

© Kyungwoo Chun. Image: courtesy Raul Goñi.

© Kyungwoo Chun. Image: courtesy Raul Goñi.