"La gran mentira de la muerte", Wu Tsang, 2024. Tosh Basco. Photo ©Bella Cutugno Argudo
Exhibition
20.07.2024
20.07.2024
Wu Tsang. The big lie of death
La gran mentira de la muerte, 2024
Single Channel Video, Multichannel sound
Duration: 40 minutes
The big lie of death (La gran mentira de la muerte) is a multichannel sound and film installation conceived as a site-specific work for MACBA’s Capella. It explores poetic themes of Carmen, particularly as her myth is entangled with the performative fields of flamenco and bullfighting. Like the opera composed by Georges Bizet, these fields evoke the spectacle of death and implicate the spectator as a part of it. This work brings the ritual performance of death (real and imagined) into a conversation with cinema, which bears its own murderous traditions.
Different subalternities run through Carmen: colonial, racial, gender, class and criminality. All of them make Carmen an image of western otherness and, at the same time, she embodies one of its great stereotypes. Going further, the collision of all these subalternities displaces her beyond identity, and sets in motion the tragic destiny of the myth.
The film, interpreted by performers Rocío Molina with José “El Oruco”, Yinka Essi Graves, Tosh Basco and the bullfighter Vanessa Montoya, utilizes multi-channel spatialized sound to evoke horror genre. But, unlike a horror movie, as we enter the myth, some form of escape emerges before us. Just as the myth of Carmen proposes that her freedom can only end in the tragic fate of death, the camera has been trained to capture everything it intends to film. However, the artistic act could confront this question and, even if only for a glimpse, to make us believe in the possibility of seeing the image dancing alive before our eyes.
For many years Tsang has worked through collaboration and performance to interrogate cinematic violences inherent to capture and narration, in pursuit of the ‘impossible’ image (the liveness that escapes the image). This project was developed as part of an ongoing exchange with pie.fmc (Pedro G. Romero, Joaquín Vázquez and Enrique Fuenteblanca) as well as Tsang’s longtime collaborators Moved by the Motion, through a series of trips and residencies in Seville and the surrounding area, alongside the development of a live opera staged at the Schauspielhaus theater in Zürich.
Co-Produced by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Hartwig Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Victoria.
With the collaboration of MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
Research and development commissioned by TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.
Generously supported by CAAC Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and Excelentísimo Ayuntamiento de Guillena (Sevilla).
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Wu Tsang (b. 1982, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States) is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist. Tsang’s work crosses genres and disciplines, from narrative and documentary films to live performance and video installations. Tsang is a MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellow, and her projects have been presented at museums, biennials, and film festivals internationally. Awards include 2016 Guggenheim Fellow (Film/Video), 2018 Hugo Boss Prize Nominee, Creative Capital, Rockefeller Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and Warhol Foundation. Tsang received her BFA (2004) from the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and an MFA (2010) from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Currently Tsang works in residence at Schauspielhaus Zurich, as a director of theater with the collective Moved by the Motion.
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Wu Tsang. The big lie of death
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