Spanish Contemporary Art Network

'TOWARDS THE OTHER'

MIGUEL AZUAGA

 

MUSART-BERLIN
Danckelmannstraße 1
14059 Berlin

 

26th August – 21st September Opening: 26th August 8 pm
Opening hours: Tues – Fri 4 - 8 pm / Sat 10 am - 4 pm

Towards the other is Miguel Azuaga’s first solo exhibition in Berlin, and brings together a
selection of works that explore the constant construction of identity through biographical research and the impact of migration flows, positing a discourse in which aesthetics is inextricably linked to a socio-political context. Installation, video and photography are the media to develop this artistic production.

 

During one of his last trips to Spain in 2014, Azuaga found documents of his grandfather,
participant of a migration wave of the Francoist dictatorship’s last period in 1960. Not long
afterwards he began a research of his own identity through old documents to somehow figure out his current status as an immigrant.

 

Towards the other stands immersed in the conflict of a constant to-and-fro that fuses past and present, where the exhibition hall’s function is to agglutinate different temporal spaces.

 

The words journey or quest are substitutes for another and perhaps more explicit term, migration, whose presence in this project is obvious in the references to borders and the use of original passport files and images, thus establishing the link or connection to a past journey at which we now look askance. History repeats itself, but so do stories, and here the two trade places to become a metaphor for the act of migration.

 

“All of us harbour in ourselves hidden gardens and plantations”, Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science, apropos of certain human aptitudes —eruptions — that only become apparent after years and generations have passed; the children and grandchildren “bring to light the inner qualities of  their grandfathers, the qualities that their grandfathers themselves did not know about”.

Exhibition organised and produced by Miguel Azuaga and Musart Berlin. Funded and supported by:

SCAN – Spanish Contemporary Art Network

University of Arts of Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin) , Institut of Art in Context (Institüt
für Kunst im Kontext)

Spanish Embassy in Berlin