A Rock Turns into a Frog
With Carlos Irijalba, Stephan Kuderna
Rijksakademie Reading Room, Amsterdam
Admission free, RSVP here
'A rock turns into a frog’ is a process publication on the last years of Carlos Irijalba’s art practice, where relative states of matter and non-linear procedures intertwine. Some projects take several years to crystalise while others happen spontaneously; others never see the surface or face dead ends. Research and discovery of material/immaterial, living/inert, and their limits and contradictions are the core of Irijalba’s practice.
With texts by Stephanie Hessler (curator, writer and director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway) and Paul Hobson (Director of Modern Art Oxford) and design by Claes Storm, this book decentralises the finished work, overlapping analogue and digital graphic material in exercise of art practice documentation that rarely sees the light. (Caniche Editorial)
For this presentation, Carlos, together with Stephan Kuderna, metal workshop specialist at the Rijksakademie, will engage in conversation on their work together during and after Carlos’ residency at the Rijksakademie, and the many creative technical solutions that they found during each project’s development. A time of material experimentation that very much marks the spirit of the publication.
Carlos Irijalba
Carlos Irijalba was a resident at the Rijksakademie of Amsterdam in 2013 and 2014. He graduated at the Basque Country University and UDK Berlin in 2004. He was awarded with the Guggenheim Bilbao Photography Grant (2003) and the Marcelino Botín Art Grant (2007/2008) and also received the Shifting Foundation Grant and first Prize and the Revelation PhotoEspaña Prize among others.
Carlos Irijalba has exhibited at international Art Museums, including the CCCB Barcelona, MUMA Melbourne or LMCC New York.
Irijalba’s work is driven by the principle of pertinence, the necessary or superfluous character of an object to cohabit the existing world. The drive to be selective and responsible for the objects we secrete, as sometimes silence or void is the best contribution. From that position the work focuses on the potential relation of object, image or installation to activate the places they inhabit and react towards an existing environment using human space-time scale as the measure to understand the world. The work reacts to the relative experience of time, space and the fictional construction of the territory. Here, geological tempo, natural and man made cycles are crucial to position our dimension to enhance the criticality of the very current moment.
In recent projects as 'Skins' (2015) or 'Muscle memory' (2016) the exercise is exogenous to an existing system, if a physiological metaphor may apply, his work tries to act on a particular company or atelier as an enzyme that affects the result of a digestive process. When intervening on an atelier specialised in geological replicas, or another one developing metal foam tissue, he tries to mirror their activity for the work to become self-aware. In essence a distillation of an industrial dynamic’s own self, sometimes against their functional purpose, against the grain, to liberate new debris and connotations.
Stephan Kuderna
Stephan Kuderna is a metal and mechatronics specialist. After attaining his master's in construction and vehicle building, Kuderna opened his own company in Germany. His work experience includes working in prototype building for the car and aeroplane industry, as well as collaborating with industrial designers and architects. He has a special interest in material and production technologies. Since 2000, he has worked at the Rijksakademie as a technical specialist for the metal workshop.
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