Skip to main content

Free entrance

Itziar

Exhibition Temporary

Las estatuas. Itziar Okariz

Current

27/06/2025 - 05/10/2025

Tired or benevolent, we listen to each other.
Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation

Las estatuas, by Itziar Okariz, is the third project concluding the exhibition cycle Right to Reply, which began in 2023 with Cristina Garrido and continued the following year with Núria Güell.

These exhibitions aimed to reflect on the collection of the Museu d’Art Modern de Tarragona, raising urgent questions from the perspective of contemporary creation and expanding the context of the involved authorships. The strategy consisted of presenting an audiovisual piece near the museum entrance and, on the first floor, inserting other works by the artists—complementary to the video—among the permanent collection.

These encounters activated dialogues and collisions, posing legitimate questions about the why and how of the legacy that has been accumulated in the museum. The issue lies in challenging this legacy and its institution—doing so as many times as necessary and with as many voices as possible.

Itziar Okariz now presents a video alongside two transcriptions, and finally, a live performance to take place on the opening day, Friday, June 27, in one of the museum’s rooms.

In the video, the artist speaks with a sculpted head by Oteiza in the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum. We witness an encounter and the conversation that arises between Okariz and the sculpture.

The other works, installed on the museum's first floor, consist of two full transcriptions—one in English and the other in Spanish—of two videos from the same series and analogous situations, in which Okariz dialogues with other statues in the language of the country where they are preserved and displayed. Only the texts are presented, without the videos.

Finally, the action the artist will carry out on the opening day is based on reading aloud, in front of the museum audience, the transcriptions (or are they also translations?) of dreams that Okariz has had over the past few months and hastily jotted down upon waking—“without paraphernalia, without scaffolding.”

Itziar Okariz’s works are exercises in effectively and affectively questioning what surrounds us, both inside and outside a museum. Starting from her body, the artist works with language. She strips away everything superfluous to shift us into a barren land that precedes speech and voice; even though she uses both, her words never quite become discourse.

Through repetitions and interruptions, speech and breath, the artist tries to represent the structure that articulates and sustains language. She freezes it just before it adheres to convention, thus restoring a language stripped of the unnecessary and capable of holding all the poetic power of the inevitable.

I’m not sure the word exercise adequately describes Itziar Okariz’s research or actions. And although it may not be entirely accurate either, I prefer the term essay over exercise, as it preserves certain attitudes close to experimentation and repetition. Needless to say, it is rather useless to try to define such a wide-ranging and recognized practice—renowned for its trajectory and radical in both content and form.

Like a regular visit to a museum that we care about, the essay lives in a state of continuous repetition and experimentation, separated only by the necessary pause between one visit and the next—as if it were a longed-for reunion with a loved one. It is indeed about repeating and paying attention to the differences—not so much what can be improved or learned, but about discovering that subtle variation that surfaces when repeating the same action again and again under identical or very similar premises. In every essay, inevitably, there is a movement, a gesture, a tone, a different accent. Always and only slightly different from the one before. Referring to the essay as a literary genre, Barthes wrote: “It is neither about narrating, nor constructing, nor instructing, but perhaps about provoking events.”

Through her works, we glimpse fragments of the dialogues the artist establishes with the inanimate and, perhaps, with the untranslatable. In any case, these are conversations between her and a silent, though persistent, interlocutor. Okariz observes, challenges, listens, reacts, speaks, transcribes, and lends her voice. And she starts again. Again and again. The audience thus becomes witness to fragments of infinite conversations, during a museum visit, without cuts or editing. In the same way, we hear the artist’s voice presenting the traces left by her dreams—those she was able to remember upon waking and now seeks to shape by translating them into essential words.

Transcriptions and translations.When the voice is interrupted, silence reveals its breath. The face-to-face between the artist and Oteiza’s sculpture is an action that takes place in the public space of the museum—a place that belongs to everyone and that everyone has the right to question and respond to. The conversation with the statues is an inevitable experience for anyone who approaches a work with concentration, stretching the time it takes to read what lies before us—to observe and to listen. Usually in silence. Here lies the decisive shift introduced by Itziar Okariz: raising her voice is enough to include us in these conversations.

Conversations that seem to have begun before the viewer arrived, just as dreams precede waking—and surely, they could continue indefinitely and endlessly.

 

From July 5 to September 29 at the Museu d'Art Modern de la Diputació de Tarragona