UNTIL SUNDAY 13/10
CCCC. Museum, 2
Don't miss it! To his 86 years, the performer Esther Ferrer It's a quick mind, incisive and honest that launches lucid reflections like bullets. At the presentation of his first exhibition in Valencia he left a host of headlines that more than justify a visit to the Center del Carme to see his work. (focused on photography), its installations and the traces that some of its performances have left over the last fifty years, ephemera by definition. Established above all in the world of performance, for her, the important thing is the moment and the process, not so much the end, That's why he confessed without embarrassment that he could live perfectly without doing exhibitions. but here it is, the National Prize for Plastic Arts 2009 and Velázquez Prize 2014, inviting us to learn about part of the work he has developed since the early sixties, when the public raised their eyebrows at that thing called performance. “They had no idea”, Some spectators even threw objects at him during some actions that they did not understand., out of pure boredom. However, Ferrer is clear: “making art is what balances me the most (although little), because through it I try to understand everything I live, although in the end I can't understand practically anything”. In this sense, Some of her actions are made from questions that she asks herself and imagines that many other people do too.: What is feminist art? Does the social class of origin condition practice and recognition in the case of a woman artist?? They are two of the many questions engraved on a wall of the Center del Carme that the artist asks you to answer on post-its.
The body, space and time are the three fundamental axes that run through his performances, also his graphic work, that always, always, they have a performative meaning. In this exhibition you can see two capital installations in which he puts his own body in the center without fear of wrinkles and sagging that crack over time.. If old age in general is frowned upon, female old age is twice as old, hence Ferrer shows it naturally, without confetti or rumors, but directly and honestly. One of his installations confronts halves of his face photographed at different times in his life to show the effect of time on his face., the other blurs her self-portrait step by step until it completely dissolves into black and white., until it becomes completely invisible. In another piece he recreates the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden with photographs of his pubes, in a takeover of his body that elaborates his own discourse, far from the male gaze that has always used the female body for its own pleasure. “But if we undress ourselves we are narcissists”, Ferrer snorted with resignation.. And the future of performance? “I'm not worried at all, It will transform and I will like it more or less. And if it disappears, let it disappear”. S.M.
