BRUSSELS.- The exhibition El Ángel Exterminador (The Extermination Angel), presented at the
Palais des Beaux-Arts BOZAR in Brussels, takes as a starting point Buñel's movie in order to suggest later –leaving aside stylistic or trend logics– an encounter between artists from different positions and perspectives.
As the curator, Fernando Castro, puts it, the exhibition would work as a “tableau vivant, a living picture in which the theatre dimension is vital, as well as the ability to reconfigure the world from fragmentary elements in a bricoleur way”. It thus represents the will to show, in the framework of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union, a vision of the different ways of doing, by creating a space where, as with Buñuel claustrophobic room, “anything can happen”.
To tackle with constraints, which in this case are both of a geographic and a contextual nature, the curator envisages the "urgency to learn how to live with extraordinary limitations" through the works of 28 artists (Lara Almarcegui, Txomin Badiola, David Bestué y Marc Vives, Nacho Criado, Pep Durán, Dora García, Dionisio González, Mateo Maté, Abraham Lacalle, Enrique Marty, Concha Pérez, Javier Pérez, Gonzalo Puch, Bernardí Roig, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Santiago Sierra, y Fernando Sinaga y Diego Santomé, Jaume Pitarch, Juan Luis Moraza, José Ramón Amondarain, Xavier Arenós, Belén Uriel, Jacobo Castellano, Domingo Sánchez Blanco y Rodrigo García), complemented with the theatrical intervention of Rodrigo García and La Carnicería Teatro, a dance piece by Olga Mesa, an action by Paco Cao and a performance by Esther Ferrer and a performance by La Ribot.
The curatorial proposal questions the exhibition space as a closed space, “the need to escape and the wish to stay within”, where paintings, videos, installations, photographs or dance and theatre pieces are forced to live together. The works would then find themselves as the guests of the movie, forced to communicate in a space from where they cannot escape, whose limits cannot be infringed, creating new links and relations or revealing the underlying relations.