Duration: October 28th / December 4th, 2005
Curated by: Amparo Lozano

Author(s): Isabel María

Isabel María’s work (Mérida, 1972) has been characterised, as a whole, for its intention to explore the idea of identity in the post-modern field; in contemporary inhabitation as one of the major phenomena of today’s societies and, consequently, in her own experience as a missing subject (she herself has lived in different countries and inhabited several houses). She also investigates how this modern information/ communication society transforms our minds, memories and recollections. In her projects, no matter their support (audiovisual production, soundtrack, photography…) she tries to reflect the daily reality of her immediate surrounding, by means of a marriage of reality and fiction, and their levels of dialogue.

The project The Face and the Face, carried out exclusively for this exhibition, was an installation in which the spectator finds different projections of still images—although some of them show slight movements—as in a puzzle on the outside walls of the room, a kind of contextual wrapping for the two audiovisual narrations which can be found inside: Glenn is a video that narrates day-to-day life for a Spaniard who works in the promotion of PEPCID, a medicine to treat ulcers. Carmen is about the daily odyssey of this Argentinean woman who works in diverse night clubs, livening people up with her piano-synthesiser. All the images are from New York, and it is the spectator who generates with their movement the visual track leading from one narration to the other.

Isabel María has studied in Spain, Germany and the Unites States. She has exhibited in Kassel, Lisbon, Cáceres, Madrid, A Coruña and Barcelona. Together with this exhibition, the MEIAC published a catalogue including the following essays: Reality Bites: Comments on the Documentary in Museums, by Antonio Weinrichter, teacher at Carlos III University, ECAM and film critic; and Identities and Discourses, written by the curator of the exhibition, Amparo Lozano.

• Publication