At first glance it looks like an everyday scene, even banal. But it is a dark moment, an act of violence after the contemplation of which we will leave with our heads full of questions. An older man silently attaches explosives to his body while another, younger, mends a jacket and stuffs food into a can. In the background, you can hear the prayers of a nearby mosque. what do they think What horrors must they have seen? Who will be their victims? The film by Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari is called Nature morte (Dead Nature) and was shot in 2008 in southern Lebanon, in an area that served as a base for Palestinian resistance fighters in the late sixties. The conflict between Israel and Palestine seen through the tense and contracted faces of its protagonists.
“What is the relationship between the two men?”, “Will the pain pass from one generation to the next?”, adds new questions Mei Huang, researcher, writer and curator of Des de la frontera, an exhibition at CaixaForum that invites reflection on borders, geographical and also those that “are invisible or mental, that have to do with issues such as race, gender, religion or ideology, and generate great gaps between the I and the you, and the them and the us”.
Nature morte is part of the Comisart creation support program, by which a young curator, in this case the Chinese woman established in Barcelona Mei Huang, is invited to develop a project from the funds of the La Caixa Foundation Collection and those of Macba. Huang has chosen eight that talk about border conflicts (the Zaatari video) and flags, “the quintessential symbol of national identity.” “Through them, the pride of belonging and the sense of exclusion is fostered”, reflects the commissioner, who has distributed 19 televisions throughout the room on which the flags of 19 countries are flying. It is an installation by the Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth, Broken Flags, which forces us to look down to observe them, removing their solemnity and subjecting them to the whipping of the wind as a metaphor for “ the force of nature that flags, which represent man-imposed geographical borders, cannot control,” he suggests. And in the background, presiding over the space, Not all that moves is red (Teló)
Red and black are again present in the black Virgin with twins, by the Italian Vanessa Beecroft, “which breaks the mental boundaries about the color of the skin that a religious image must have”. Next to him, on an illuminated mound of earth covered with bullet casings, the mutilated body of a child can be seen flanked by the Communist Manifesto and the New Testament. A historical piece by Francesc Torres, Construcció de la matriu, (1976), which symbolizes how “the new Spain was born from a pile of ashes and bullets. A high cost for the birth of a country”.
Des de la frontera, which shows for the first time Isidoro Valcárcel Medina’s work Grafismes de la frontera, also explores those everyday borders, those that separate childhood from adulthood (J oc de dol, by Annette Messager) or Pep Duran’s no less mysterious, Esotro s/t, four dresses hanging on hangers facing one another, isolated and alone. “Perhaps those who were once part of a community today seem to be separated by an abyss”, interprets Huang.
