Masterclass Antoni Muntadas. “Other fears”

  Wednesday, October 15
  7:00 p.m.
  Free
MUN Theater

With Bartomeu Marí, curator 

"Other Fears" is the title of the exhibition that the University of Navarra Museum is dedicating to Antoni Muntadas, one of the most important contemporary artists of his generation, who has articulated his work as an expression of critical spirit, the media landscape, and the intersection of art with various disciplines and methodologies.

The exhibition is organized around a new work, presented to the public for the first time, produced by the Museum as part of its Tender Puentes artist residency program. Entitled "Entre miedos" (Between Fears, 2022-2025), it is part of a project, a series of works begun by the artist in 2005, which analyzes the ways in which Western societies have positioned fear as one of the main political arguments since the beginning of the 21st century.

This proposal explores fear as an integral, albeit invisible and intangible, part of the San Fermin bull runs. Presented as a video installation that envelops the viewer "between earth and sky," the work provides an unusual and unexpected image of the festival and the collective rituals that form part of it. Iconographically abstract, the installation gives a leading role to sound and also offers an alternative vision to the clichés that dominate the image of the city and its most emblematic festival. "Other Fears" is a unique work in the artist's oeuvre. It represents fear in a dramatic structure dominated by sound and with an iconography that tangentially portrays the city. In a way, the work recovers the urban experiences lived during the period of confinement as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when production of the work began.

The exhibition also includes a selection of existing works that, within the same line of interest, provide a context for the reception and understanding of this new work, declining other expressions of fears that, in various parts of the world, confirm this global psychological, social, and political paradigm shift. In 2005 and 2007, Muntadas produced two video works that are "television intervention" projects on two specific places in the world, two broad borders of great symbolism where the "fear of the other" is staged, characterized by the rejection of immigration and racism. "On Translation: Fear/Miedo" (2005) and "On Translation: Miedo/Jauf" (2007) bring together interviews with people who experience the tensions in these areas on a daily basis, with images from television archives that refer to the term "fear" on the border between Mexico and the United States on the one hand, and the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Spain and Morocco, Europe and Africa on the other, as well as notes and contributions from the artist. These videos seek to convey how fear is an emotion "translated" on both sides of the borders from very different perspectives. "On Translation: Fear/Miedo" was created to be broadcast between August and November 2005 from locations that in some way connect the centers of power and decision-making with the places where these policies are manifested on a daily basis: Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City, and Washington, D.C. "On Translation: Miedo/Jauf" is not a work about emigration/immigration from Africa to Europe, nor about religion or terrorism. It addresses the construction of the South as fiction and reality connected to phenomena of the unknown, the exotic, and the different, or the attempt to understand and perceive hope in a continent "forgotten" by the Western world, Africa, as a promise for the future.

On the other hand, Alphaville e Outros … (2011) is a video that was part of the installation of the same title and was based on Alphaville, a "walled" residential neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil. Narratively very different from the previous works, this piece examines the phenomenon of "gated communities" and how fear and the pursuit of exclusivity lead to urban isolation and exclusion. This work takes as its reference Jean-LucGodard's1965 filmAlphaville, which offers a dystopian, science fiction vision of a totalitarian urban future. Scenes from Godard's black-and-white film are juxtaposed with images of almost utopian promotions of the Brazilian "Alphaville." Muntadas presents an architecture and organization of space based on the rhetoric and mechanisms of fear and control.

"The Construction of Fear" (2008–2025) is a work that refers to the place and time in which it is created. A selection of headlines from the press (local and national) in the months preceding the opening of the exhibition, containing the words "fear" and similar terms such as "panic" or "terror," is reconstructed as a mural using the same fonts in which they appeared in print. This work represents a map of local fears where the exhibition takes place in that same year... and has been exhibited in places such as Alicante, Amman (Jordan), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Caracas (Venezuela), and Paris (France), among others. 

The exhibition is completed by the edition "Fear, Panic, Terror" (2011), consisting of five framed panels, each including six covers of books published in the US, whose titles include the concepts of "fear," "panic," and "terror." The work reflects how the publishing industry has commercially exploited the different types of fears felt by English-speaking societies, while exponentially increasing the sense of collective fear and its various expressions and consequences.