Darren Almond

Darren Almond, Wigan (England), 1971, is one of the most acclaimed creative of that famous generation of British artists known like “Young British Artists”, who revolutionized international the artistic panorama at the beginning of the Nineties. The time, the concept of “duration”, the melancholy and the notion of public and deprived historical memory, are the axes on which its work is developed. Through sculptures, photographies, videos, facilities and an innovating use of the technology their works surround to the spectator in a temporary experience in which sound and image, atmosphere, reflection and story are revealed within very particular a daily atmosphere. The DA2 will be the first centre of Spanish art that reunites a selection of its last more significant videoinstalltions of the 6 years emphasizing between all of them:

“Traction”, (1999) an ambitious projection in three screens, that the father and the mother of the artist portray to. In one of them it is seen the father answering the questions of Almond on the damages that suffered working like bricklayer, in the screen that is opposite its mother is recorded listening to the interview and in the central screen, to slow motion, a machine excavates and removes the Earth. The film in the open becomes an intimate picture of the family, leaving internal and external scars, while it reveals the preoccupation of the artist by the physical and psychological marks who leaves in the people passage of time.

“Schacta”, 2001, show in two screens faced a group of workers and a camera advancing by a tunnel a background music that remembers the drum of an African tribe, concretely of Uganda at the same time that the voice of a woman accompanies music.

The poetic and monumental videoinstallation If I Had You, (2004) selected recently for the prestigious Turner Prizes, has adapted specifically to the architectonic particularities of the “old jail” of the DA2 and could be understood like the logical continuation of “Traction”.

The Installation “If I Had You”, 2003, are like a familiar album in movement, walking by the history of a life who is the life of the own Darren Almond and particularly of its grandmother. According to the own Almond it remembers: ” (...) If I Had you begins when I visited my grandmother years ago. She was in the hospital and when she saw me she confused with my grandfather and that was the departure point of the piece. I decided to take it to visit a room in the tower of Blackpool, where she was used to dancing with my grandfathers. My grandmother whispered me in the ear that threw to him much of less and than it would like to return to dance with her husband, did not have her body but its mind still was with him (...)” The four projections of the installation show in the first place an illuminated water source, elixir of the life, secondly a unknown pair of dancers…, thirdly one long screen with a windmill that symbolizes the passage of time. Finally, the image of his grandmother presides over the four screens, watching and remembering its past while we discovered in the diverse expressions of its face moods that go of the sadness to the melancholy.

Darren Almond always evokes and plays with basic feelings, in the case of If I Had You is his own memories, his personal vision of his family, his intimate ghosts… because something phantasmal in the movements of the dancers exists, in distant music, the strange lights of that mill that gives returns… is then a tribute of his own family, to his youthful memories, that distant voice of the past which it calls to him time and time again (and it calls to us).

Pressetext

Darren Almond
If I Had You ( Si te tuviera)
Vídeo, Instalaciones, Fotografías
Koproduktion: II Internacional Festival of Castilla y Leon