VITORIA-GASTEIZ.- In autumn 2024, the museum opened three new exhibitions: Chillida. Usos Aplicados, curated by Peio Aguirre which, on the occasion of Eduardo Chillida’s 100th birth anniversary (San Sebastian, 1924–2002), explores his incursion into graphic design and the application of his work in the decorative arts; refugios-diarios (lerro galduak), an exhibition by Joxerra Melguizo (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1968), curated by Enrique Martínez Goikoetxea (Collection Curator, Artium Museoa), in which the artist emphasises the idea of process, manifesting as a trace of day-to-day work in the studio; and El caso de l(a casa) museo(a), an exhibition by Belgian artist Joëlle Tuerlinckx (Brussels, 1958) that challenges us on such seemingly abstract issues as space and time, although translating these concerns into the viewer’s experience within the exhibition space and the temporalities it contains. Tuerlinckx’s exhibition in curated by Beatriz Herráez (Director, Artium Museoa) and Catalina Lozano (Chief Curator, Artium Museoa) and is organised in collaboration with KANAL, Brussels.
On February 28, the museum will present a survey of the work of painter Inés Medina (Cáceres, 1950), that encompasses her work from her early monochromatic experimentations in the late 1970s to the beginnings of her computer-generated work in the mid-1990s which influenced her compositions and research on colour.
On May 30, two new projects will open to the public: an exhibition by late Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman (Brussels, 1950–Paris, 2015). Curated by long-term collaborator Claire Atherton, Facing the Image explores Akerman’s film installations developed in collaboration with Atherton over several years, unfolding the sequential dimension of the moving image into three-dimensional space. Offering a non-prescriptive approach to Akerman’s work, the exhibition proposes an embodied experience of her films where fragmentation and repetition are privileged over linearity and narrative structure. This exhibition follows a presentation at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona in 2023. Simultaneously, the museum will present a solo exhibition by Basque artist Josu Bilbao (Bermeo, 1978) whose work anticipates language and form without fully realising them as stable enunciations, leaving them in a state of latency, as a murmuring that refuses to become word. His practice is strongly influenced on one hand by the experiences of space, and the doing and undoing of the structures that define it; and on the other, by the fragility of marginalised languages and dialects based on oral tradition.
During the summer, educational practices will once more become protagonists of the museum’s programme with the third and last instalment of a series exhibitions dedicated to art education in the Basque Country that began with A Place to Think in 2022—centred in experimental educational initiatives developed between 1957 and 1979―and continued with edonor denok inor ez in 2024, which looked at processes of institutionalisation fostered during the transition to democracy. This exhibition will focus on the experimental methodologies and knowledge transmission through practice that characterised the 1990s and that are firmly represented in the activities of the art centre Arteleku, an important hub in San Sebastian that hosted a series of influential workshops led by local and international artists between 1987 and the early 2000s. This exhibition is curated by Mikel Onandia, Sergio Rubira and Leire Vergara.
In the summer, Artium Museoa organises together with CICC Tabakalera and, in collaboration with Museo Oteiza, the sixth edition of JAI—Institute of Artistic Practices, a study programme based in Vitoria-Gasteiz and San Sebastian with a visit to the Museo Oteiza in Alzuza. JAI acts as a space to exchange and disseminate artistic methodologies taking as a point of departure the methodologies of the artists participating in the programmes of the leading institutions, with a committee formed by the artists Ibon Aranberri, Alejandro Cesarco, Itziar Okariz and Olatz Otalora, together with Oier Etxeberria (CICC Tabakalera) and Catalina Lozano (Artium Museoa).
For the third consecutive year, Artium Museoa organises Mechanical Bonds, an Autumn programme devoted to performative practices in the Museum, curated by Iñaki Martínez Antelo and Catalina Lozano, as well as Trama, an interdisciplinary programme that considers the moving image in relation to other art media and areas of knowledge in the form of talks, performances, concerts, workshops and screenings, curated by Garbiñe Ortega and Arantza Santesteban.
The autumn season will open with two new exhibitions. On one hand, a solo presentation by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios (Washington D.C., 1978), focusing on her Who is afraid of ideology? series where she explores internationalist decolonial feminist and ecological struggles and the potential of creating networks of solidarity and alliances for exchange of knowledge. Artium Museoa is co-producing the latest film of the series together with Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin) and Fundació Miró (Barcelona). In the film, the artist continues to tackle the question of the history of property in the Ottoman territory from legal, economic, geological, agricultural and political perspectives by asking the question of how to revert to a relationship to land that is one of usership. The exhibition is curated by Agustín Pérez Rubio.
Following the interest on moving image practices and the technologies that make them possible, the museum will present a yet to betitled project dwelling in the relationships between moving image, ethnography and the ghostly blind spots inherent in coloniality and the resistance of non-hegemonic epistemes to be colonised by institutionalised knowledge or by the technologies that collect and produce images.
