Legible-Visible. Between the Film Frame and the Page explores the relationship between print publications and audio-visual documents, two of the most important media underpinning the social and cultural landscape of our time which also define the evolution of contemporary art in the 20th and 21st centuries.
The emergence of relatively inexpensive home video technologies in the 1970s brought with it an alternative model for the creation and diffusion of artist publications, and a prolific period of exploration, reflected in the work of Baldessari, Gilbert & George, Boltanski, Carrión, Rucha and Rosler, among others. The popularization of digital media at the beginning of the 21st century sparked a revolution in the systems of production of both audio-visuals and books, exemplified by a new generation of artists, such as McGeorge, Kentridge, Cine Quieto or Van Leijsen.
Mela Dávila proposes a theoretical and historical framework for works that the market long dismissed as secondary on account of their serial nature. This characteristic, together with the particular space of experience they generate, and the linearity and temporality common to both media, have opened up a range of new narrative (or anti-narrative) possibilities which have enabled artists to redefine contemporary art.
Starting from a detailed study of 24 double works, Maite Muñoz looks at how different artists have taken advantage of the permeability between publications and audio-visuals, in which ideas and strategies of narration and editing intrinsic to both mutually infect and enrich one another through the play of opposition, complementarity and dialectic.