international symposium: Representation and enigma: From the threshold of images

The Museu Tàpies wants the celebration of the Tàpies Year to culminate in an international symposium to encourage new interpretations and new ways of approaching the artist’s legacy today, given that we are currently rewriting certain historiographical genealogies. As has been pointed out repeatedly, the centenary of Antoni Tàpies’ birth involves not only a homage to the past but also a celebration of all that is to come. In this respect, it is absolutely necessary for us to be able to rethink a legacy that still speaks to us and in which there still remain many layers of interpretation to reveal and discover.

The international symposium Representation and Enigma: From the Threshold of Images, coordinated by Manuel Borja-Villel and Imma Prieto, will revolve around three broad conceptual areas:

• Representation and non-representation, focusing on the representation or not or reality and on the pair of figuration and abstraction, generating new, more permeable nominal situations.
• Time and non-time, concentrating on the continuity and otherwise of techniques, of symbolic languages, breaking with linearity and with the chronological sense of the creative process.
• Enigma and specificness, relating creation to magic, incorporating the concept of the demiurge and highlighting the multiple layers of interpretation of a work of art and the active role of the viewer in activating narratives.

Through these three areas, and with the works by Antoni Tàpies that make up the retrospective as a backdrop, participants in the symposium will be encourage adopting a free, personal approach, to allow them to look again at a visual and though code in order to rethink it and rethink ourselves today. As indicated in the symposium programme, the invitation goes out to researchers, academics and curators from Spain and abroad without any apparent connection with the artist, precisely to encourage this disruption.

The three sessions of the international symposium will begin with an initial talk, followed by two replies to encourage criticism and dialogue between the guests. The programme features Hans D. Christ, Isabel de Naverán, Leda Martins, Marie José Mondzain, Carmen Pardo, José A. Sánchez, Rita Segato, María Sierra and Amador Vega.

The full programme will be announced soon.