2023-05-16 18:43:26
The video artist Toni Serra realized that he was not only working with images, but also (or above all) with an essential element that composes them: light. To understand what this element means for the human being, he looked at the spirituality of the Sufi poets of the 11th and 12th centuries and at the Iranian architecture of the same period. The entrances of light to these buildings, as well as their darkness, are part of the video ‘Asemanastan. The land of heaven’, which since yesterday has been exhibited in a double-screen installation at the Bilbao Fine Arts, with blocks of sequences that appear alternately in each of them.
The artist from Manresa (1960) died in Barcelona in 2020, before he could finish the work. He had submitted the proposal to the Multiverso Grants of the BBVA Foundation, which also sponsors the museum’s video art and digital creation program. Thanks to her, he was able to record material that he was left to edit. Alex Muñoz, his close collaborator, did the work, and Barbara Held, also familiar with his work, edited the sound.
Generation of stereotypes
Presenting the video were the director of the museum, Miguel Zugaza; the curator of the Fine Arts Miriam Alzuri; the deputy director of the BBVA Foundation, Laura Poderoso; and the curator Laura Baigorri, a personal friend of Serra’s. It was this she who summarized the trajectory of the four decades of the artist’s career, in which she made 44 videos.
The Catalan creator was first interested in answering the question of whether it is the creator who captures the images or if they capture the creator, that is, an investigation into the nature of the creative medium itself. He continued to analyze the generation of stereotypes in media images and from 2001 he entered the “open threshold” stage, according to Baigorri. “It means an attitude of trusting in life and giving oneself,” he clarified.
‘Asemanastan’ belongs to this stage, a word invented by the artist to refer to Iran, which in Persian is ‘Aseman’, a term that also serves to refer to ‘heaven’. ‘Asemanastan’ would then mean ‘the land of heaven’, as the title of the video shows.
He is signed as Toni Serra and, in brackets, by Abu Ali, which means ‘Ali’s father’. With this name he began to sign his works since the birth in 2002 of his son Ali.
#Toni #Serra #light #creative #material