Delve: Una exposición que explora lo fantástico en relación con el espacio

Project Concept:
Delve is an exhibition with an associated research events programme exploring the relationship between concept of space and the fantastic. It explores space from the point of view of decolonising processes in art practices; ones that can be realised through translocal friendships and cross regional collaboration. Space cannot be other than an idea created and imagined by humans; an expression in language and art that is necessarily geopolitical. The exhibition explores the subversive and countercultural role that the fantastic can play in the creative re-imagining of space inter-culturally. The exhibition convened artists whose practices represented notions of space and place through the drawing, painting, photography and the moving image as their media, where each of the works presented an opportunity for the public to enter into a parallel space-time through the work.

Coinciding with the exhibition, Delve explores and develops research on transnational artists’ curatorial network-creation, promoting inclusivity and opportunity for diverse artists to exhibit according to a self-led curatorial ethos and process.

Space - the way we articulate it, is a method of organising the world, constructing it as the ‘real’. Space is not a container in which we dwell; it is made for and by humans. It also becomes political when space is a question of allocation. For example, the use of the word ‘globalisation’ pictures a world ‘as if’ it were an integrated whole. Yet from a relationship between continents that, in the last century that was structured by history, the 21st century transports us into a ‘depthless horizontality of immediate connections’ (Doreen Massey, 2005 p.81): the prevalence of AI, 24-hour finance systems, instantaneity, the proliferation of social media networks, the collapse of spatial barriers leads to the annihilation of space by time. From a neoliberal imagining of a ‘global’ space comes the immediacy of a single present, a present that spans continents, and carries assumptions of an easy and seamless multi-culturism. ‘Globalisation’ is imagined in terms of a ‘free unbounded space’ that enables the right to mobility of people or goods, controlled by wealthier nations. Yet at the same time, in debates on immigration, we are stuck in an archaic system of securitised boundaries and national protectionism.

To be able to question our relationship with ‘local’ and ‘global’, to prioritise a politics of trans- local artistic friendships, the 'Delve' artists’ group of 6 international artists tested out a hypothesis with this show. We sought to excavate what is impossible to experience about the present, by activating the fantastic. This does not entail providing a framework in which ‘the fantastic’ will appear, but rather we are positioning space itself as the fantastic (Patricia García, 2005, p.2) to reconstruct the gallery site. The ‘spaces’ that our projects created did not point to localities and regional differences from the diverse environments we call ‘home’. A more relevant influence is the virtual space of net culture, air travel and the constant migratory flow of digital environments.

If we think of a novel, the form of a novel allows its readers to inhabit characters who pass through holes in walls and become invisible. Literary spaces are elastic constructions in which distance fluctuates, buildings and people intermittently appear and disappear. Similarly, in the films of Mia Taylor, Mochu, and Javier Olivera, impossible occurrences become credible events; ones that unfold in a cinematic space-time. When standing before Pak-Keung or Lucia King’s drawings, their intense assemblage of lines may not yet demarcate a finite path, but they record what has been, or what is becoming a live-able space of the future. Our artworks are sites of perpetual transition. They do not ‘represent’ worlds, they invite audiences into a way of seeing, a process. They bring to light the uncertain depths of desired landscapes and cosmologies. Often focused on a microcosmic view that carries universal systems within it, a close attention to detail connects the works.

The represented artists were:
Helena Goldwater (UK) Pak-Keung Wan (UK/Hong Kong) Mochu (India) Javier Olivera, (Spain/Argentina) Mia Taylor (UK) and Lucia King (UK/Spain)

The exhibition was curated from a concept authored by Lucia King, who organised and managed the exhibition and public talks events. Five of her own artworks (in painting) also featured in the exhibition itself.

The exhibition and events were hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV) where the gallery venue was curated by Laura Silvestre Garcia, Dean of Culture at the UPV and Miguel Angel Herrero, International Relations Officers (UPV) The logistics and events management was conducted by Artist/Senior Lecturer Printmaking (UPV) Miriam Del Saz.

The exhibition ran for one month (11/9/24 to 10/10/24) at the Josep Renau Gallery housed within the Faculty of Fine Art San Carlos, Universitat Politècnica de València (henceforth UPV) included the following associated events:

1. The exhibition, which included over 50 artworks.
2. Five artists’ presentations delivered by 5 of the six exhibiting artists
3. Three public gallery tours delivered by Miriam Del Saz (Project Manager, Spain)
4. Keynote presentation: an inter-disciplinary Literary-Fine Art dialogue between Prof. Patricia García and Dr. Lucía I. King on the project theme.
Two versions of an e-catalogue were produced and circulated to disseminate the project’s identity and targets.

What I set out to learn and disseminate from mounting the exhibition and talks was:
How can I meet the challenge of convening a range of artists from international sources (across world regions) to illuminate the project themes from their geopolitical positioning, converting this into a trans-cultural site of discourse? This was successfully achieved in a context where new knowledge was also disseminated to students of the UPV and wider public via the open talks series.
Other knowledge transfer achieved was in the realm of interdisciplinary dialogue in the curated talks of the exhibition which included literary scholar, Patricia Garcia (See Activities for details) The focus here was on Literary-Fine Art interchange on the subject of space and the fantastic.