2017
IZARO IEREGI
TIME FOR LOVE
Time For Love includes more than a year of research. During the summer of 2015, Izaro Ieregi made several visits to the documentation centre of the Benedictine Foundation of Lazkao and obtained an extensive collection of stickers from different social movements in the Basque Country. This material served as an excuse to start working on the decontextualization of the depicted images, focusing on images with a performative character, which involves action, body, and violence in a certain way.
This project deals with the subjectivity in social groups, with the way it is created and sustained, in order to question the representation and perception of images. For this reason, the artist considers it important to leave her own context in order to see reality represented as signs, therefore, to return to zero degree. For the execution of this, she has set up a methodology of exercises based on a score written about a selection of these images. By using these exercises called "Grade Zero", the aim is to demonstrate all these ideological mechanisms of a community that also live in historical moments. The first exercises were carried out in Bilbao, then in Xiamen (China) and now they will be implemented in Buenos Aires. The substance of the exercises consist of different video and photography sessions in which a group of performers participate. The archive, the score, the bodies and the subsequent documents are the elements that structure these actions.
For the artist, it is a question for the future, a responsibility of the tomorrow, which invites us both to think about the story and also to rewrite a decentralized history deriving from an aesthetic approach, based on working with archives of social movements.
Izaro Ieregi (Algorta, 1987)
The research of Izaro Ieregi aims to trace historical memory through different cultural manifestations, focusing on an ever-changing and deeply conflicting social, political and cultural context, observing from a multidisciplinary perspective. The artist concentrates on her immediate surroundings, fusing her own personal experiences with a community that has a powerful socio-political imaginary. Through the many faces and aspects of recreation she looks to the past to activate the future.
In Izaro Ieregi's work, sculpture, video art and different cultural manifestations intersect. Graduated from the Fine Arts Faculty of the UPV-EHU (2010), she held her first solo exhibition at the CEAC space in Xiamen, China (2017). She is currently working on her next exhibition at the Casa Torre de Ariz (Basauri). She has also presented her work in the following spaces: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2017), NY Space in Manchester (2016), Getxoarte (2016), Bilbao Arte Fundazioa (2016) and the Complutense University of Madrid (2015). She is a founding member of the OKELA space based in Bilbao.