Held on 09 sep 2017
As a culmination of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with the artist Franz Erhard Walther (Fulda, 1939), featuring the participation of Elena Filipovic, Christian Rattemeyer and João Fernandes. The conversation also serves as an accompaniment to a series of activations performed by Walther.
The title of this lecture alludes to How to Do Things with Words, the influential book by the language philosopher J. L. Austin, published in 1962. In this study, Austin defines a type of sentence he calls “performative”, whereby “saying” something implies “doing” something. In other words, an utterance is an action. This performative aspect is explained through language’s capacity to travel beyond description or observation to produce a determined reality, with such a reflection having a major influence on numerous contemporary artists, among them the unique Franz Erhard Walther.
Walther’s artistic practice departs from the static and solid idea of sculpture as he develops a series of objects made primarily from organic and textile materials and activated by the viewer’s own action. Activation is a process which inter-relates the body, artistic object, time and space to produce a work which is inseparable from the notion of participation. A sculpture, conventionally understood as a free-standing object, is redefined as a public, collective and temporary event. As in J. L. Austin’s text on language and action, for Walther the meaning of a sculpture cannot be separated from its use.
Although the artist’s work bears a relation to different artistic events in the 1960s and 1970s, it always stands equidistant from them. For instance, the investigation into the artistic object and viewers’ experience which brings him closer to minimalism; his interest in the connection between language, action and conceptual art; the use of organic materials and the importance placed on the process, and on Povera Art. This encounter, therefore, is articulated around these points of contact and distinguishes between different axes and lines of work. With that in mind, Elena Filipovic will address the relationship between the artist, the body and dance; Christian Rattemeyer will consider the relationship between abstraction and painting; and João Fernandes will approach the figure of Walther, setting out from his research into language.
In collaboration with
The Franz Erhard Walther Foundation
Sponsorship
illycaffèParticipants
Franz Erhard Walther. German artist. He participated in documenta 5, 6, 7 and 8 (1972, 1977, 1982 and 1987), and his work has been exhibited in numerous solo shows in institutions such as MoMA, New York (1970), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1977), Kunstverein St. Gallen (1980), Berlin’s Nationalgalerie (1981), Stedelijk Van Abbenmuseum, Eindhoven (1984 and 1993), Hamburg’s Kunsthalle (1991 and 2013), Mamco, Geneva (1994 and 1997), Fundación Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2003), Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlin (2009), WIELS in Brussels (2014), and The Power Plant, in Toronto (2016). In 1994 he was awarded the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, and the Golden Lion in 2017 at the Venice Biennale.
Elena Filipovic. Director of Kunsthalle Basel. Between 2009 and 2014 she served as a curator at WIELS in Brussels, where she organised the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther: The Body Decides. She also co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennial with Adam Szymczyk, and has organised a range of exhibitions with emerging artists, for instance Marcel Duchamp, Alina Szapocznikow, Mark Leckey and Teresa De Keersmaeker, and different touring retrospectives. She is the author of The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2016) and David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2017), and recently edited the publications Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form (2016) and The Artist as Curator: An Anthology (2017).
Christian Rattemeyer. An associate curator in the Department of Drawings at New York’s MoMA, he has organised exhibitions such as Lines, Grids, Stains, Words (Museo Serralves and Museo Wiesbaden, 2007) and Alighiero Boetti (Museo Reina Sofía and Tate Modern, 2012). He has also published widely on contemporary art and has edited the catalogues Exhibiting the New Art (2010) and Compass in Hand: Assessing Drawing Now (2009).
João Fernandes. Deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía and curator of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
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The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Francisco López and Barbara Ellison
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The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
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L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
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Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
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