Iratxe Jaio + Klaas van Gorkum

May 2016. Interinstitutional working group in Azala Espazioa and Artium, Basque Museum-Center for Contemporary Art

On the 5th and 6th of May, a working group will be convened to study and discuss the legal, ethical and social ramifications of exhibiting the polemical archaeological discovery from the Iruña-Veleia site in Basque Country in Artium, Basque Museum for Contemporary Art.

When these artefacts were denounced as a forgery, they became entangled in a legal process that has been ongoing since 2008. As a result, they have never been exhibited to the public, and are currently under custody of Bibat, the archaeological museum of Vitoria-Gasteiz. To display them in the museum for contemporary art requires a displacement of only 300 meters, but involves a radical change in discursive context.

Taking the hypothetical collaboration between the two museums as a starting point, the working group will discuss how the confrontation between artistic, scientific and political sensibilities may be oriented towards a narrative that overcomes the false-authentic binary, and how to involve the public in the institutional processes that determine the evolution of their own material culture.

A seminar at the San Telmo Museum in Donostia San Sebastián, in the context of the exhibition 1966 | GAUR KONSTELAZIOAK | 2016.

We will present an essay on the relationship between history and writing, invoking "The Writing Lesson" by the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss to revaluate the purpose of avant-garde manifestos such as that of the Basque Gaur Group.

We have been invited to present our work in the "BIdeOtik Program. Responding to other audiovisual narratives.", organised by Azkuna Zentroa and Itxaso Díaz in Bilbao. The screenings will be preceded by a workshop at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Basque Country in the morning.

26 April 2016, 9:00 - 13:00 Workshop at the Fine Art Department of the Basque University

Recent works as well as fragments from films such as "Les Maîtres fous" by Jean Rouch will be taken as a point of departure to discuss the subversive potential of strategies of mimicry, falsification and reproduction.

26 April 2016, 19:00 Azkuna Zentroa, Alhóndiga Bilbao

Screening and discussion of two videos: "Work in Progress", in which the labourers from the rubber industry in Markina-Xemein are hired to reproduce hundreds of little modernist sculptures from Oteiza's "Chalk Laboratory"; and Últimas Palabras", in which an actor rehearses the final statement made by an ex-commander from the military junta in Argentina who has been condemned to a life sentence for crimes against humanity.

We are presenting two of our latest projects at the San Telmo Museum, as part of the cultural programme of Donostia - San Sebastián European Capital of Culture. The first is a Basque premiere of "Nire ama Roman hil da", our project on the controversial graffiti that were found on ancient potsherds at the archaeological site of Iruña-Veleia. A thousand drawings that have never been exhibited before will be displayed alongside a video in which experts attempt to decipher the mysterious inscriptions.

Also new is our reprise of Jorge Oteiza's Book of Plagiarism, "Libro de los Plagios", which has been out of print for decades. Fourteen large charcoal drawings based on images from the book accompany a small publication in which we pick up where the original author has left off in his reflections on ways to lean on other people's work.

Still on until 14 February 2016, an exhibition at Rib, a new space in Rotterdam.

With works by:

JOEY RAMONE is very proud to host the 1st solo exhibition in the gallery by artist duo Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum. The exhibition which occupies both gallery and project spaces opens on Saturday 31 October 2015 from 5-8pm and runs till Saturday 12 December.

Of Mortgages and Marriages is a storyboard for a movie that was never made. It consists of a series of drawings, traced from sources such as maps, real estate brochures, mortgage advertisements, wedding pictures and family snapshots; research material from an investigation that the artists Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum made into the large-scale urban expansion of a mid-sized city in the north of Spain. It is accompanied by two videos, Showroom and Helicopter, each using a different cinematographic technique to traverse the city and its symbolical spaces.

We are doing three talks on our work in Bilbao next week:

"Últimas Palabras. Art and the violence of speech"
October 20, 2015 from 12:00 to 13:30
IMPORTANT: due to high number of inscriptions, the location has been changed to Sala Turing, first floor of the ESIDE-Engineering building of the Deusto University
Reservation required
The Chair in Leisure and Knowledge of the Institute of Leisure Studies at the University of Deusto is pleased to invite you to a seminar with Iratxe Jaio and Klaas van Gorkum. Following the presentation of the video "Últimas Palabras", there will be a discussion with the artists about the critical capacity of art: What should be the place of art in the face of the rhetoric of power? Can one expect moral or political effects from the encounter between the public and art?

Conversation with Jaime Cuenca
October 20, 2015 from 18:150 to 19:15
In the context of postgraduate studies "Disfrutar las artes" at the Deusto University

Conference at the University of Basque Country: "Todo lo que digas" (Anything you say)
October 22, 2015 from 11.00 to 12.30
Graduate Hall of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Basque Country in Leioa
In this conference several works will be discussed in which the artists have taken the judicial process as a performance which stages and choreographes conflict.

Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea
Donostia - San Sebastián, Spain
June 25 - September 26, 2015

Opening Thursday 25th of June at 19:30

"Lo que ha de venir ya ha llegado" (what is to come has already arrived) is an exhibition about the times we are living in. A radical malaise runs through society after years of what has been described as the first major crisis of globalisation. A profound change is necessary, and it's the citizens who must be the active agents of that change. But its realisation and development depends on a rearmament of ideas which allow us to imagine solutions. With this as a point of departure, the exhibition brings together a number of artists and collectives whose work and activities reflect upon or indicate possible ways out of the predicament.

Participating artists:
Cecilia Barriga, Sarah Browne, Carolina Caycedo, Peter Coffin,  David Diao,  Druot Lacaton & Vassal, Ecosistema urbano,  Yona Friedman, Dionisio González,  Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Regina de Miguel, Anna Moreno,  Claire Pentecost, Mathias Poledna,  Mika Taanila,  Alain Tanner,  The Temple Crew, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, ZEMOS98, 15M Files.

Curators:
Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes, Alicia Murría, Mariano Navarro

We have the pleasure to announce that we made it into the final selection of THE MATERIALITY OF THE INVISIBLE, a fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academy instigated within the framework of NEARCH, a prestigious European project-based network of archaeological institutes and university departments.

The following artists and art collectives have been selected out of some 300 applicants: Leyla Cardenas, Joey Bryniarska and Martin Westwood, Klaas van Gorkum and Iratxe Jaio, Matthew Wilson and Rossella Biscotti.