Bestué-Vives, Claudia Claremi, Alia Farid, Eulàlia Valldosera. ‘RAVAL TIMEZONE’
16 — 18 November 2022
— A project by Arash Fayez and The Voice of the Artist
- Curators
- Arash Fayez and The Voice of the Artist
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RAVAL TIMEZONE is a screening program of four videos placed in four shops in the Raval neighbourhood.
Title of event: Raval Timezone
Date of event: 16, 17, and 18 of November 2022
Time of event: 5-8pm
RAVAL TIMEZONE is a screening program comprising four video works presented in four shops in the neighbourhood of Raval, where commerce is mostly run by the migrant population of this district. For three days, these shops will add another function to the many services they provide to the people of the neighbourhood, by generously offering their space and equipment to display these video works. In the second-hand shop El Trueque [calle de la Riera Alta, 24], you can watch Acciones en casa by Bestué-Vives that represents various actions in a private space that could be called home. The video is presented in the midst of countless objects from many forgotten houses, stored before they find a new home to reside for some time. A few meters away, and surrounded by a vivid stock of glowing fruits, Claudia Claremi’s video La Memoria de las Frutas is presented on the small display of Punjab fruit shop [calle de la Riera Alta, 43], to remind us of the forgotten stories and histories of fruits that have disappeared from our everyday life. In the Indian restaurant Haldi [calle del Carme, 71], Alia Farid’s At the Time of the Ebb is played on the television installed on a pink wall, under glamorously colourful ceilings. The video brings us to an island during summer solstice, where the local residents are performing traditional rituals to inhabit a place that exists beyond what we consider as geopolitical or ideological borders. The large display of Hussain butcher shop [calle del Hospital, 147] is hosting Envases Borrados by Eulalia Valldosera while Hussain (Delawar) is preparing the meat for the neighbours’ dinner. In the video a mass-produced household object is manipulated and its name is erased until it becomes a container with no name. As an ending note, most of the migrant population (of Raval) has limited time to visit art spaces. This is why RAVAL TIMEZONE is aiming to bring these artworks to locations that the residents are connected to, and more importantly, where they spend part of their day, which is the neighbourhood they inhabit and its stores. While visiting these spaces, please be mindful that the main audience of this screening program are the people of the neighbourhood of Raval. We thank you for your understanding.
Arash Fayez is an artist based between Madrid and Barcelona. He has a bachelor in architecture from the university of Soureh (Tehran, Iran) and a Masters in Fine Arts from California College the Arts (San Francisco, United States). Fayez’s practice investigates the condition of displacement in relation to desire where he researches notions such as statelessness, limbo, and in-betweenness. Spanning writing, performance, and video, his projects explore the condition of a mind in limbo as a result of the body in between; or, in other words, the mental and physical states of being in limbo as a result of being between two locations, two cultures, or two identities. His practice looks at the segment that separates these two phenomena and aim its audience to neither one place nor another but to what can be found in between.
His work is primarily based on autobiographical experiences interlaced with fictional and nonfictional content. By employing storytelling strategies, he combines fiction and documentary to construct an emotional landscape that resonates with the in-between. Fayez has presented his projects at venues such as Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); Musée du quai Branly (Paris); the British Museum (London); the Wattis Institute (San Francisco); Asian Art Museum (San Francisco); Württembergischer Kunstverein (Stuttgart); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); Cineteca Matadero (Madrid); and La Virreina Centro de la Imagen (Barcelona). He is currently a fellow artist at the Académie de France (Casa de Velázquez) to develop his new film “A Game of Chess” and a publication “Apolis”.
Last update 9th November 2022
The Voice of the Artist
The Voice of the Artist provides an unmediated space for artists to communicate with the audience. Artists are central to the debate and they deliver a very different perspective from the mainstream one. The Voice of the Artist especially commissions artist videos that offer new ways of understanding and an alternative approach to everyday issues following the letters of the alphabet. Listening to new visions and perspectives can be helpful to form opinions and informs how we (society) make decisions and the way in which we relate to each other.