Tere Recarens and Philippe Meste

Tere Recarens was born in 1967 in Arbúcies (ES), she lives and works in Berlin (DE)

Tere Recarens uses drawing, speech, photography, video and installation in her interdisciplinary practice, with an immediate language that relies on humor, irony and irreverence. She places great importance on the idea of travel, understood not only as physical and geographical movement but also as an emotional and relational journey. In this sense, her travels and biography form the raw material of her artistic path. Bamako, Barcelona, Paris, Berlin and Tehran have served as the backdrop for her expeditions and her work. T. Recarens creates a kind of self-portrait by drawing on her ability to adapt and read her immediate surroundings, and on the connections she establishes with others. Sometimes she plays with language, other times with elements of material culture such as textiles, in order to explore notions of identity and belonging through her own experience.

Art as a disruptive and critical experience that does not differ from life is the foundation on which most of T. Recarens’s work unfolds. This principle often applies to her own lived experience, but at times it is artistic perception itself that becomes the subject of deconstruction, as in Terremoto [Earthquake], a work in the collection of the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Created in 1994 and first presented in Marseille the same year, then two years later in the chapel of the former hospital in Barcelona, this piece was reassembled in 2016 for the group exhibition Punk. Sus rastros en el arte contemporáneo [Punk. Its Traces in Contemporary Art], organized by MACBA. It remains one of the artist’s most striking works. The playful quality, irreverence, surprise, absurdity and challenge of transgressing learned norms found in this installation run throughout her entire practice.

T. Recarens addresses the viewer directly, urging them to position themselves in a concrete way in relation to the artwork and the exhibition context. But she goes even further by invoking the instability of the surrounding world. She is also committed to denouncing the oppression of women, particularly in Iran, a country with which she maintains close cultural ties. Notably, her installation Baharestan Carpet, presented at MACBA in 2023 as part of the exhibition Colección MACBA. Preludio. Intención poética [MACBA Collection. Prelude. Poetic Intention], features a painted cardboard carpet that gathers Iranian stories and legends, while inviting the viewer to walk across it and become part of the community evoked by these tales.

She has exhibited regularly since the 1990s in galleries and institutions such as Arts Santa Mònica in Barcelona (2004), CAC Málaga (2006), FRAC Bourgogne in Dijon (2009), and Art At Work in Turin (2014).

Philippe Meste was born in 1966 in Marseille (FR), he lives and works in Paris (FR)

Philippe Meste became known for his subversive actions. In 1993, he equipped a polystyrene boat with rocket launchers to attack the aircraft carrier Foch (Attack on the Toulon Naval Base). A desperate and destabilizing act that, through absurdity, defied even the expectations of public authorities; and through its radical nature, went beyond a mere denunciation of war to experiment with forms of combat doomed to failure. The failure of the traditional goal of attack (the physical destruction of the enemy) proves to be undeniably destructive when it exposes the flaws of a political logic.