"More than humans" Dominique González Foerster, Tomás Saraceno

Dominique González-Foerster’s holographic work OPERA (QM.15) (2016), features the artist herself appearing in the guise of the legendary opera singer Maria Callas. Dressed in the singer’s signature red dress and dramatic makeup, she performs by lip-syncing to arias from Cherubini’s Medea, Verdi’s La Traviata and Ponchielli’s La Gioconda bringing to life this extraordinary persona that was Callas. The haunting figure is projected in a dark space and seems lifelike at first, as if it were a ghostly apparition of Callas herself.

The work forms part of a larger body of work by Gonzalez-Foerster in which she appears as a range of fictional or historic figures from Callas to Marilyn Monroe and Sarah Bernhardt, all legends of our recent past whose passionate lives and untimely deaths were a source of much public attention and scrutiny. Gonzalez-Foerster draws on these personalities as a great source for her work, and transforms herself personally into their tragedy and mystery. The work draws from the history of photography, early cinema and an interest in the uncanny, and, in the words of the artist, is not so much a performance as it is “a kind of séance.”

Tomás Saraceno is best known for his large-scale, interactive installations and floating sculptures, and for his interdisciplinary approach to art. His work often aims to explore solutions to current world problems, such as new modes of transportation through air without the need of fossil fuels. have developed a body of work inspired by the complex structures of spider webs research.

In the works in the exhibition, the artist studies the process and construction of these webs and displays them as originals, blown up to human scale, or as musical instruments whose amplified sounds make their elaborate structures vibrate and audible to human hearing. For Saraceno, spider webs provide a wealth of data around forms of sociality, construction, and communication that could prove essential for imagining new ways for humans to inhabit the world. He has worked with researchers at MIT to develop a scanning technology which uses tomographic methods to create detailed, three-dimensional scans of the webs produced by spiders at his studio. The scans enable new analyses to be undertaken which reveal how various strands of spider silk physically interact and attach themselves to one another.

The exhibition is part of a four-year agreement between TBA21 and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza to present a series of contemporary exhibitions at the museum. It will be accompanied by a wide-ranging public programme aimed at attracting new audiences including a public conference with the artists on 24 September 2019 and a workshop by the Saraceno Studio focusing on arachnophobia and arachnophilia. The exhibitions are presented invthe Moneo Temporary Exhibition Hall on the ground floor of the museum and an educational programme structured by the Educathyssen department as well as activities and conferences using TBA21 expertise will be programmed to coincide with the exhibition.

Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Founder of TBA21 said: “I strongly believe in art’s power to transform and its potential to raise awareness and show the possibilities of alternative realities that generate empathy and enlightenment. The role that TBA21 wants to assume in Madrid, is to bring this kind of activation through new ideas to the public space, to a regular and growing local community, as well to nurture an engaged and motivated new audience to the museum. The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection should be seen as a collective of energy, generationally driven, not simply a collection of artworks that span centuries. Culture is an expression of who we are, our history, but also of the progress that we have made.”

“Education refers to motivation, to the desire of experiencing aspects of the world that are less known to us. No art preaches or illustrates us about ideas, but it rather creates a motion inside ourselves. That is, things we experience a force that compels us to ask more, to question, to even dislike or doubt what we see and yet what we experience remains in our minds. This memory of what we just experienced is the best classroom ever, one totally tailored for us, for our concerns to take another shape, our imagination another path. The contemporary art program of TBA21 is intended at creating this sense of surprise in the context of the Thyssen National Museum, a feeling of generosity intended to inspire you, to make us feel we are part of the solution.”