Antoni Muntadas
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ACT Professor of Practice Antoni Muntadas exhibited in the 12th Istanbul Biennal in Istanbul, Turkey (September 17 – November 13, 2011).
Untitled (History)
“Although all five group exhibitions organized in the context of the 12th Istanbul Biennial take specific works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres as their points of departure, two – Untitled (History) and Untitled (Abstraction) – do not appropriate the exact titles of those works. This show, Untitled (History), is inspired by a work simply called “Untitled”, made in 1988. It is one of Gonzalez- Torres’s dateline pieces, in which groups of names, either historical or from popular culture, are written in white type on a black background along with the years they occurred or appeared. There are several dateline pieces, taking the form of Photostats or public billboards.
Our interest in these and other dateline works relates to how history can be rewritten according to a process of selecting and editing names of places, products, or events, and how with this seemingly simple gesture, the writing of history is brought into question.
Other works in this exhibition deal with “before” and “after” photographs. … Antoni Muntadas refers to Media Sites-Media Monuments Budapest (1998) as a project on media, memory, silence, and emptiness. It focuses on sites of events that have been explored by the media. The Budapest series (there is also one concerning Washington DC) juxtaposes photographs of nine landmarks related to the city’s history.”
-Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann, Curators of the 12th Istanbul Biennal
