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Organised by
Universitat de València
Produced by General Foundation of Universitat de
València
With cooperation from Auditori de Galicia (Santiago de
Compostela), Palau de la Virreina (Barcelona) and Museu
de la Pau de Gernika (Bizkaia-Euskadi)
Ministerio de Cultura
Project: Ana Teresa Ortega
Curator: Pep Benlloch
General coordination by Norberto Piqueras
ARCHIVES OF MEMORY
In the early years of the 1970s photography started to
get closer to contemporary art in certain European
countries and the United States, first as an accompanist
and later as an essential document. This rapprochement
brought autonomy along. Today, photography is a main
pillar for artists from different backgrounds.
In our country, this renewal of photographic language
was poor, slow and discontinuous. The socio-political
conditions of the Spanish State did not foster change in
any way: the transformation was only strengthened by the
effort and willingness of those involved: a group of
young photographers like Joan Fontcuberta, Pere
Hormiguera, Grupo El Yeti, Jorge Rueda, etc. under the
influence of the magazine Nueva Lente; Catalan
artists such as Eugenia Balcells, Muntadas, Francesc
Torres, or Miralda, and finally authors who consolidated
the most serious and rigorous alternative in Spain, like
Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Esther Ferrer or Juan Hidalgo.
Valencia lagged behind; Ana Teresa Ortega was one of the
artists who actively participated as from the early
1980s.
Far from traditional photographic formats, her early
works are defined by a discourse distanced from the
usual documentary practices at the time and from a
photography too focused on technical results, and she
also used hybrid proposals with sculpture. On the one
hand, her photo-sculptures were characterised by
Neopictorialism -her images called on a detachment from
the dominating documentary accuracy and serial
reproducibility; they were unique, which in a way
brought back the aura. On the other, these works
followed other conceptual currents of the 1970s, such as
appropriationist practices. Ortega would reuse images
from advertising, television, documentaries, etc.
producing new montages which reminded us of some
avant-garde practices but with a post-modern approach
and a clear intention to question the actions of the
mass media in contemporary society. |
