In the hourglasses of Majd Abdel Hamid, the time is interrupted once in a while. They are made with the concrete crushing of the wall erected by the israelis in the palestinian territories. But there were some little pebbles that get stuck when descending, the neck of the clock.
As they were suspended at the time the bunkers he built everywhere the president stalinist Albania Enver Halil Hoxha. They are now a part of the powerful installation that Anila Rubiku has spread on the ground of the IVAM, very close to the pictures of the lebanese Randa Mirza in which the skyscrapers of Lebanon seem to be peace on the blue of the sea. It is an optical effect, because they are advertising images in which the conflict disappears. Not like in the Mediterranean, whose history is marked by war and death, culture and life, exclusion and reconciliation. “In reality, it has not changed much throughout history. Many of the problems of today are the same that already had at the time helena or roman,” says the architect and professor of Aesthetics Pedro Azara, curator of the exhibition Inhabiting the Mediterranean, which opens tomorrow at the Institut Valencià d’art Modern and lasts until the 14 of April.
Not surprisingly, the sample, which is inscribed in the program of the thirtieth anniversary of the museum that will be held in February, brings together 150 works, both archaeological and contemporary art, with the purpose of discussing the modes of life in the riparian countries. A lattice of Juan Uslé shares space with a gate and roman; an outline of the balcony of Juan Muñoz, a model of Sekabet a house of ancient Egypt; some drawings on the occupation jewish that drew hidden from Gaza, Mohamed Al-Hawarjri with the excluded of the Greece that coined democracy as the deformed or prostitutes.
A sculptural garden buries the extension
The site where it is in the process of building the sculpture garden of the IVAM. Monica Torres, THE COUNTRY
The IVAM will open an outdoor sculpture garden to the public in February where it will be exhibited permanently works of Miquel Navarro, Andreu Alfaro, Angels, Frames, and Soledad Sevilla, among other authors. The expansion project of 2003 conducted by the japanese study Sanaa (Pritzker prize) expected to build there an auditorium, a plan that will be well buried. The project, whose drafting cost 4.3 million, was designing a metal skin translucent 30 meters height that covered the original building and more than 40 million for its implementation.
The pieces come from museums such as the parisian Louvre and Pompidou, the Spanish National Archaeological or the Egyptian, along with private collections and the IVAM. “We wanted to show pieces not very well known, but very interesting, as that mosaic found in Toledo, which opens the exhibition, divided into eight sections,” explains Azara. The destruction of the coastline coexists with the idealization of the Mediterranean in a show that, despite the conflict, it concludes with a message of hope: a branch slipped through the crack of a wall in an image of Jarrar.
