Iratxe Jaio & Klaas van Gorkum

artistiek onderzoek - conceptueel - geschiedenis - installatie - video

Jaio and van Gorkum have been working as an artist’s duo since 2001. In their practice they analyse and question commonplace notions of authorship, cultural identity and labour relations. They look at the world as through the glasses of an anthropologist, and frequently point that gaze back onto our own performance: What are the circumstances under which cultural products come into being? And what is their fate once they leave the hands of their makers?

An important guideline in projects which depend on the complicity of others, or which are based on shared authorship, is to explore and redefine the relation between artist and society. That is how we assess not only the contribution we might make to reflections on current societal developments, but also the influence of those developments on the meaning and value of art itself.


False Flag - The point of departure for this work is ‘Le Drapeau Noir’ (Black Flag), a relatively unknown painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte, which the artists came across during their research on art related to the Spanish Civil War. Produced in 1937, the canvas is said to have been inspired by the bombing of Gernika. It features a number of futuristic airplanes ominously hanging above the horizon. Like props from a science fiction movie, they seem to foreshadow the drones and satellites that circle our planet today, pointing towards a fundamental aspect of this historical moment: the way technological progress in aviation would forever alter humankind’s relation to territory. Jaio and van Gorkum have manufactured three-dimensional models of these airplanes. The objects are shown with a video of the Basque mountainous landscape and a soundtrack where different voices, as an inaccurate echo, enumerate body parts represented in the painting ‘Guernica’ by Picasso. Jaio and van Gorkum embrace the incongruencies and anachronisms of Magritte’s painting, which they consider to be a deviation from the historical canon in which the ‘Guernica’ of Picasso's plays a central role. From the margins, Magritte’s flying machines serve as vehicles for an unorthodox reflection on modernity, and on the role art plays in the collective imagination of historical memory. 'False Flag' has been made thanks to ANTespacio, with the support of Eremuak, Bilbao Aurrera and Mondriaan Fund.
Onder de Vleugel (Under de Wing) - "Onder de vleugel" is een ode aan Rotterdam onder lockdown. Het is een samenwerking tussen Iratxe en haar elfjarige zoon Iñaki, die vanwege de pandemie wekenlang niet naar school kon. De film is geïnspireerd op "Der Himmel über Berlin", van Wim Wenders. Een mysterieuze jongen klimt over de daken van de stad om te luisteren naar de gedachten van de mensen onder hem, en schrijft ze over op ontelbare vellen papier. Deze gedachten zijn door verschillende mensen ingefluisterd, na een oproep op sociale media. Het respons op de oproep was overweldigend. Er kwamen zo'n 200 inzendingen vanuit de hele wereld, in allerlei talen, alsof de wereld ons wilde tonen dat we niet alleen stonden in onze gevoelens van isolement.
Naturaleza Muerta con Recipientes - An installation with objects of porcelain, cast from molds that were recuperated from an abandoned factory near Donostia­San Sebastián (Basque Country). The porcelain faithfully reproduces the effects of age and erosion on the original molds, and the video documents the overgrown ruins of the factory from which they were extracted.
Alemanen kanposantue - De reconstructie van een vergeten Nazi monument uit de Spaanse Burgeroorlog, waarvan de oorspronkelijke tekst onleesbaar is geraakt na jaren van verwaarlozing, vandalisme, en vele lagen politieke graffiti.
Nire ama Roman hil da (My mother died in Rome) - An installation that consists of handmade reproductions of the "exceptional" inscriptions discovered on ancient Roman pottery shards at Iruña­Veleia, an archaeological site in Basque Country. On a video, the inscriptions are deciphered by different experts in favour of, or opposing, the theory that they are forgeries.
Libro de los Plagios (The Book of Plagiarism) - A series of charcoal drawings, based on the images from the "Libro de los Plagios" (The Book of Plagiarism). This book was published in 1991 by the Basque sculptor Oteiza, as an indictment of what he perceived to be a flagrant plagiarism of his work. The author illustrated his texts with black and white photography of abstract modernist sculptures, juxtaposing the work of other artists with his own. A booklet mimicking the style of the original has been produced alongside the drawings, in which Oteiza's poetic and polemical treatise on different ways to lean on other people's work has been manipulated and updated with our own reflections on the topic.