Experience Ibon Aranberri's "Finite Location": A Solo Exhibition Exploring Contemporary Art and Temporality

This exhibition presents the Basque artist Ibon Aranberri's first solo show in Austria, featuring a reconfiguration of his photo installation 'Política Hidráulica' and the sculpture 'Found Dead', alongside a new work 'The Partial Use of Senses'. The show focuses on the relationships between artworks rather than constructing a narrative, emphasizing the temporality and dissolution inherent in their presentation.

Ibon Aranberri's exhibition 'Finite Location' at Secession marks his first solo exhibition in Austria. The artist reconfigures his extensive photo installation 'Política Hidráulica' (2004-2010) and the sculpture 'Found Dead' (2007-2011), engaging them in a dialogue with the new work 'The Partial Use of Senses' (2014). Aranberri deliberately avoids constructing a coherent narrative, instead drawing attention to the emergent relationships and connections between these pieces. The exhibition title, 'Finite Location', underscores the inherent temporality of any spatial arrangement, suggesting that its very establishment contains the seeds of its dissolution. Aranberri's artistic practice frequently involves analyzing existing structures such as buildings, public amenities, and artworks, dissecting their various layers and foundational elements. He examines how these works relate to aesthetic history, their political and social contexts, and the collective memory of a locale. His work deciphers aesthetic signs as visual codes that bridge the local and the universal, engaging with the complex interplay of art, society, and politics. His conceptual approach to sculpture and landscape is deeply rooted in local artistic traditions, exploring contradictions and deviations from dominant formal languages. Through research, documentation, and field studies, combined with aesthetic and fictional elements, Aranberri creates complex installations incorporating film, photography, and sculpture. He views the exhibition format itself as a vital aesthetic and spatial event, where the autonomy of individual works is secondary to their interplay, connections, and contradictions, a principle also evident in his 2011 exhibition 'Organigrama'. The photo installation 'Política Hidráulica' comprises 98 color and black-and-white photographs taken from aerial perspectives, documenting dams and reservoirs across Spain and Portugal since the 1920s. These sober images of infrastructural projects, typically associated with corporate representation, are presented in a way that breaks their documentary character. The photographs are leaned and stacked as if stored in an energy company's warehouse, juxtaposing their indexical nature with a fictional element. 'Found Dead' is a sculptural installation featuring the disassembled blocks of an obelisk, scattered on the floor like a 'ruin field.' Originally based on an early 20th-century monument sketch, Aranberri deconstructs its function as a symbol of state power by presenting it as ruins. In 'Finite Location,' the stones are presented as pure material forms, entering into an open relationship with other works in the exhibition. The final work selected for 'Finite Location,' 'The Partial Use of Senses,' is a cast mold of a statue of a philosopher. Made from metal-reinforced fiberglass, this mold embodies the 'absence of the peculiar figure,' internalizing the void. This exploration of negative space as an abstraction of abstractions relates to Aranberri's earlier work 'Perpetual Continent.' The mold signifies relics of a process and the absence of a subject, pointing to the radical gestures of erasure in modernity and the utopian vision of a new beginning that broke with tradition. Through the conception of 'Finite Location,' Ibon Aranberri creates an aesthetic situation that suspends the original meanings and intentions of individual works, allowing for new interpretations. He probes the nature of art by deliberately dislodging his works from their original contexts and examining their essence. The exhibition invites viewers to establish connections between the works, focusing on the formal and aesthetic relationships rather than the interpretation of content, thus posing the question: what remains when a work can no longer be 'read' in its conventional sense?

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