WORKING DOCUMENTS EXHIBITION

Working Documents is an exhibition that – by means of discursive art practices – explores the emergence of visual and performance documentary strategies for social critique.  
The work in Working Documents reaches into gender politics, de-identity, translation as a form of mediation for questioning complex historical cultural referents, performance as symbolic geography, collaborative agency for the construction of public images and the reception of documentary images through relational formats.

The need to document and create documents requires us to forge new narratives that aim to intervene in the real world, overlaying the supposedly neutral notion of direct filmmaking and capturing events directly. Filmmaking strategies such as reassemblage, appropriation, the fictionalization of the mise en scène and postproduction narratives are all clear symptoms of a post-capital time, when image/documents offer critical, open and plural readings of social contexts.

Preceding the exhibition, a yearlong process has seen a series of debates between Working Documents participants and different social and cultural agents in Barcelona. These took place as public activities within a variety of contexts – the 16th Barcelona International Women’s Film Festival, the Exit social and cultural squat centre, and the Fora de programa cycle at the Barcelona Centre for Contemporary Culture. Such activities, together with an online wiki, were used as platforms for discussion of the processes that lead to documenting a context as a form of action and representation, of the dissemination of resources, promotion and the different self-production/self-management strategies for art practice in social contexts.

The end result of this collaborative process is an exhibition with an anagrammatic conception where each art project intervenes in a relation to the whole. Working Documents offers an open choice of itinerary through its modular structures that operate both on screen and off, where works are connected across a reticular mesh of received notions now de-documented.

Montse Romaní and Virginia Villaplana
Researchers and Cultural Producers
Exhibition Curators

Participating artists:
Natalie BOOKCHIN, Marina GRZINIC & Aina SMID, Emma HEDDITCH, Alejandra RIERA, Maria RUIDO, Sandra SCHÄFER.

Exhibition Venue: 

La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
La Rambla, 99. Barcelona (Spain)
19 November 08 - 8 February 09

http://www.bcn.cat/virreinacentredelaimatge