Opening: Thursday, September 15, at 8pm, with the artist.
Michel Soskine Inc. is very pleased to present a solo exhibition by Ixone Sádaba, one of the most outstanding young Spanish artists of her generation.
The artist presents: "Surface, precipitated" her latest project, now shown for the first time, developed in March 2016 during her return, after several years, to Iraqi Kurdistan.
"I first traveled to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2008, invited by the Delfina Entrecanales Foundation during an artist residency in London.
After that first trip and realizing that I didn’t understand anything that happened there, I decided to return on my own in 2009 and 2010 to visit the friends I made there. In 2010 I got pregnant, so until March 2016 I couldn’t return to Iraq.
Many things have changed since the last time I was there. A strong oil crisis and the emergence of ISIS in 2013 have made survival and coexistence even harder. The children I portrayed in 2008 are now teenagers. Without opportunities to find a job or leave the country, they have only two choices: join ISIS or join the PKK.
Kurdistan is large and intense; it’s a jail and a shelter. A garden of poppies where the roads smell of oil.
The works now presented are kind of an assemblage of different layers of materials and meanings. Each of the overlapping elements: fabrics, texts, photographs, portraits, glass, mirrors... have their own history on this path.
To create these works different elements were gathered and I have worked with them as raw materials. Painted fabrics, wood, steel profiles, old glass... the final works are complex, as complex is their reality. "
Ixone Sádaba
Bilbao, June 2016.
IXONE SÁDABA
(1977, Bilbao, Spain)
Sádaba pursues her interests through photography and installation, constantly exploring the limits of the individual and violent nature of mankind.
Usually portraying what she describes as “Political Scenarios”, the work of Ixone Sádaba takes a double stand to photographic practice. Sádaba presents an analysis of the typology and of the formal and physical development of representation as a construction of observed matters. Furthermore, photography acts as a field study through which Sádaba questions the dimension of glance, over and beyond the regulatory framework that defines or pretends to define an image.
Ixone Sádaba received her BA from the University of the Basque Country in 2000, her Master degree in Arts Direction from the Antonio de Nebrija University in Madrid (2001) and a Postgraduate Diploma from the International Center of Photography in New York. Awarded with the Generation 2011 Prize and a Finalist of the Sovereign Art Foundation Prize in 2012 among others, Sádaba has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Reina Sofia Museum, MoCCa Contemporary Art Museum in Toronto and the Museum of Contemporary Art of New Orleans. Sádaba's works can be found in public collections such us the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, Reina Sofia Museum, ARTIUM, MUSAC, Iberdrola, the BBK, the Community of Madrid, etc., in addition to different private collections.