The Heretical Proclamation is the result of the ambitious commission undertaken by the curators Raisa Maudit and Àngels Miralda to shape the Contemporary Biennial TEA 2024. The theme positions artistic and curatorial practice as a praxis of resistance towards the dominant ideologies upheld by those in power. The term "heresy" traditionally refers to beliefs that go against religious doctrine; in this context, the term emphasizes how art challenges societal or political conventions. As a proclamation, it suggests a loud, howling, visceral expression of dissent towards a political climate that is becoming more controlling and authoritarian.
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I landed in Tenerife on the afternoon of the exhibition opening, arriving from mainland Spain. As a North dweller, I recognize the seemingly calm Atlantic waters that surround the rocky island, home to the active volcano Mount Teide, or "Echeyde" in Guanche – the language spoken in the Canary Islands until their colonization by the Crown of Castile in the 15th century. Since there are no water refill points in the airport and tap water isn't drinkable here, I find myself buying bottled water in a shop in the Arrivals corridor, where I glance at the headline of a local newspaper: "Canarian President Clavijo travels to Rabat to address the crisis with the Moroccan prime minister". The "crisis" in question is the influx of migrants, with NGOS reporting 4,900 registered deaths at sea along the route between North Africa and the Canary Islands this year alone. Outside the airport, there’s a queue of people, papers in their hands, waiting to be processed through an immigration hell. After a short ride, I stroll around the vicinity of TEA located in Santa Cruz’s old center, wondering about the multiplicity inscribed in this place, and guessing how the exhibition will address it amidst the contemporary tumultuous state of affairs.
The exhibition begins with the Mutable Room, a space that functions as an archive where literature about and references for the exhibition can be consulted. It is a place to gather for conviviality and attend the vast public program of formal and informal performances. In thinking about the exhibition’s architecture, encountering a space dedicated to education and sociality as a starting point suspends the expectation of spectacle. The bibliographical archive, indeed, defies the logic of Eurocentric thought and positions us in a very specific mindset, far away from globalized Western thought. In this space, titles such as Queer Nations. Marginal sexualities in the Maghreb by Jarrod Hayes mingles with Inventing the Indigenous and The Metabolic Museum by Clémentine Deliss and Neil Holt, engaging decolonial scholarship, diversifying Western frameworks, and re-thinking the possibilities of exhibition-making.
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As Raisa Maudit recounts, the curatorial framework that organizes the exhibition and the bibliographical archive stems from artistic proposals rather than having been outlined by the curators. The notion of responsive curation, or response-able practices, is cultivated by paying attention to the rhizomes of different projects and building a narrative that connects the local to wider geographies, re-making colonial maps across them. The participating artists focus on the Canary Islands, North Africa, and Latin America, with particular attention to the Guarani people, as well as Eastern Europe history. The thematic threads that hold the different parts of the exhibition together seem to cover a multiplicity of critical issues: Tracing Histories, Lineages of the Present; Identities Against the Grain; Rooted into Place; Violence against the Earth; and Methodic Transmutation. But what lies in the cracks between these words?
Archiving is a responsibility in both artistic and curatorial practices, whereby choosing past narratives influences how the present is told and recollected. Archiving is a gesture encountered in various artistic proposals, such as those by Miguel Rubio Tapia, Laura Mesa Lima, Victor Leguy, Ariel Kuaray Ortega, and Gabriel Bogossian. Although they store the memories of different agents, whether of a landscape, or material mummies, or the experiences of a fictional ethnographer, the archive remains a container for radical imagination. The physicality of the territory is explored in a dialogue between the works of Carla Marzán and Abdessamad El Montassir. In Marzán’s "La escuché desde la otra montaña" (2024), Canarian soil is used in making sculptures that form both interior and exterior landscapes, juxtaposed with El Montassir’s "Trab’ssahl" (2024), where oceanic horizons remind us that the desert has its rhythm, one that has been altered by war and conflict.
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The exhibition's trajectory is carefully choreographed, fostering dialogues between artworks that generate fruitful conversations. Furthermore, the exhibition is impeccably permeated by the lighting design and wall colors, which reinforce the exhibition's thematic threads and complement the works' aesthetics. Working closely with Carlos Martín Ponz on the installation, a fine sense of craft is evident in engaging these artistic dialogues from a material perspective, such as in the film installations of Ezra Šimek, Anna Engelhardt, and Mark Cinkevich. Within the same space, there is a shift from light yellow to dark red, moving from Šimek’s gender-transitioning ode to Engelhardt and Cinkevich’s horror aesthetics of Russian invasions. As most of the films are exhibited without headphones or other means of isolating their audio, a beautiful merging occurs, as in the case of watching Šimek’s film "Joyful Flame" (2022). The machine-human voices from Izaro Ieregi’s video "(Apuntes para) La ira neumática" (2023) in the room next door merge seamlessly with Šimek’s subtitles: "Suddenly I’m hybrid".
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What’s most compelling in this exhibition is its immersive quality and the cinematic approach to exhibition-making. After some time inside the exhibition, other senses are activated. Sound, as noted, in particular, has a prominent presence, as does smell in Šimek’s installation, and in Maï Diallo’s "Corpus foraminis" (2024), which uses soap to reflect on women’s roles in the domestic sphere. Taking on an almost forensic aesthetic, Diallo’s works and Ieregui’s introduce the female body as both other and as a source of pain and power. In Ieregui’s video, human voices emit screams, and cries of rage that become almost mechanical, like an endless train. This experience of the voice contrasts with Al Akhawat’s "+212" (2024), wherein the collective has created a multicultural call shop located in a fictionalized Morocco. Visitors sit and listen to messages left on individual phones. Walls pasted with stickers, love notes, non-mainstream advertisements, and political slogans, surround me as I pick up one of the telephones. On the other end, I hear a voice in a language I don’t understand, but it takes me somewhere South. Then I realize I’m already there, but art institutions sometimes have the power to erase memory. Then another voice says, in Spanish: "I want to grow up, but not to forget."
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The Heretical Proclamation invites us to occupy a space without grand gestures or high-tech media, where a whispering sound instills both criticality and hope that more than what we have been indoctrinated to believe in and attend exists.
Like any structure that challenges the hyper-stimulated gaze of capitalism, the biennial requires time and attention. Its serpentine narrative, both thematically and spatially, reflects the subtle ways soft power operates in our lives. The exhibition concludes with projects interrupted by war as if their discourse were written in media res. In Lamia Joreige’s "Uncertain Times. Background for a script" (2024), her handwriting on the wall tells the story of Ihsan Turjman, an Ottoman soldier who lived through the events leading to Palestine’s colonial submersion, an ongoing process with devastating consequences both for humankind and for the land. This narrative is paired with paintings installed behind, allowing us to form our images before encountering Joreige’s. Once again, in an exercise of exhibition remixing, the sound of children's voices from Dejan Kaludjerović’s "Dream Station" (2024) accompanies Joreige’s story, merging these histories of struggle. A large semi-circular structure hosts a near 1:1 scale screening of "Dreams Station", a short film set in an empty train station in Ukraine where time seems frozen in a moment of absence. In the film, the station’s walls are filled with the voices of children, as they are interviewed by the artist about their dreams.
I left the Canary Islands, thinking that a lot must be processed and done, but I was determined to sharpen my sensorium to attend to the many forms of societies and cultures shaped by violence, which may be the hardest task art can invite us to undertake.
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- Image caption
Cover: Al Akhawat, "+212". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
fig. 1: Anna Engelhardt and Mark Cinkevich, "ONSET". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
fig. 2: Mai Diallo, "Corpus Foraminis". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
fig. 3: Carla Marzán, "La escuché desde la otra montaña" and Abdessamad El Montassir, "Trab’ssahl". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
fig. 4: Ezra Šimek, "Joyful Flame". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
fig. 5: Al Akhawat’s, "+212" and Laura Mesa Lima, "Dos moldes para un constructor". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
fig. 6: Carla Marzán, "La escuché desde la otra montaña". Photographer: Maria Laura Benavente. Courtesy of TEA Tenerife.
