Abel Azcona facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Abel Azcona
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Abel Azcona
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Abel Luján Gutierrez
1 April 1988 Madrid, Spain
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| Known for | Performance Art, Process Art, Body Art |
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Notable work
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| Movement | Conceptual art, Performance Art, Process Art |
Abel Azcona Marcos (born 1 April 1988) is a Spanish artist, specializing in performance art. His work includes installations, sculptures, and video art. He is known as the "enfant terrible" of Spanish contemporary art. His first works dealt with personal identity, violence and the limits of pain; his later works are of a more critical, political and social nature.
Azcona's works have been exhibited at the Venetian Arsenal, the Contemporary Art Center in Málaga, the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Art League, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York and the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. His work has also been exhibited at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka and Taipei, the Lyon Biennale, the Miami International Performance Festival and the Bangladesh Live Art Biennale. The Bogotá Museum of Contemporary Art dedicated a retrospective exhibition to him in 2014.
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Early life
Abel Azcona was born on 1 April 1988, as the result of an unwanted pregnancy, in the Montesa Clinic in Madrid, an institution that was run by a religious community. It was geared towards people at risk of social exclusion and homelessness. His father's identity is unknown, and his mother, Victoria Luján Gutiérrez, abandoned him at the clinic a few days after his birth. The nuns gave the newborn baby to a man who knew his mother and who insisted he was the father, even though he met her when she was already pregnant and was her partner only sporadically. Azcona was then raised in the city of Pamplona with this man, who continuously went in and out of prison.
The first four years of Azcona's life were characterised by mistreatment and abandonment, caused by different members within his family environment, and the fact he passed through various residences, which caused several concerns about custody from public institutions of social protection. Due to this precarious situation, his birth was not registered until the age of four, in 1992, when Social Welfare intervened.
A young Catholic woman from Navarre was introduced to a newborn Azcona when she met the man who brought newborn Azcona from the Montesa clinic in Madrid to Pamplona in prison, where she volunteered; he still falsely presented himself as Azcona's biological father. She coordinated a Catholic group in the Saint Vincent of Paúl parish and was a volunteer with Caritas Internationalis. This meeting in the penitentiary center led to the baptism of Azcona when he was uncommonly old, in a parish located in front of the prison, requested by the woman, who became his godmother. She was the eldest daughter of a conservative Navarrese family (with three daughters); the family started taking Azcona in when he was four years old – typically over short periods of time and weekends – after the man came out of prison and they realised how poor Azcona's situation was. They informally cared for him until the age of six, when they requested to foster him on a more permanent basis. When he was six, the situation with the man's family got worse and custody was withdrawn. An adoption request began to be processed, and he was officially adopted by the eldest daughter at the age of seven. The family also intervened to allow him to be accepted into the Catholic schools the daughters had attended. However, he had problems adapting to the family and to the school, from which he was expelled at the age of thirteen.
Name
Throughout his life, Abel Azcona has been officially known by various names: Abel Luján Gutiérrez, Abel David Lebrijo González, Abel David Azcona Marcos, David Azcona Marcos, and Abel David Azcona Ema. Azcona's biological mother chose the name Abel and, when registering him at the Montesa Clinic as her own, he was first named Abel Luján Gutiérrez, using both her surnames. The child was not registered in the Civil Registry until he was four years of age and, as he had been abandoned by his mother, her partner took care of the child and registered him as Abel David Lebrijo González, using his surnames; these are the first surnames that appear legally. From then on, in different records and documents, such as at school, the second surname is shown as Raposo, that of the man's new partner. At the age of seven he was adopted and became known as Abel David Azcona Ema, taking on the surnames of his adoptive mother. The adoptive family refused to use the name Abel, since it implied a connection to the biological mother, so they called him David. At fifteen years of age, Azcona was adopted by the husband of his adoptive mother, becoming Abel David Marcos Azcona (taking his surname); after a family process to invert the surnames was approved, 'Azcona' returned as the first surname, and he legally became Abel David Azcona Marcos. At the age of twenty he decided to remove the name David, as he no longer had a relationship with his adoptive family, and started using Abel again, as a tribute to his biological mother and as a response to the restrictions he felt with the other name.
Early works
Azcona's first performances were created in the streets of Pamplona in 2005 when he was a student in the Pamplona School of Art. They all had a critical spirit and were an objective of denunciation. During these early years, Azcona turned his traumatic experiences into artistic works. In 2011 and 2012 his artworks started gaining greater relevance, but in 2012 he was admitted to two psychiatric clinics, one in Barcelona and the other in Pamplona, where he stayed for some time as he had deep mental issues.
Azcona's adoption was characterised by complicated situations and a lack of attachment to the family, until he abandoned it definitively when he was eighteen. He then returned to Madrid, living in poverty on the streets for almost two years. During this time he occasionally carried out artistic works in the streets of Madrid.
Artistic works
Someone Else
Someone Else is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. The inaugural 2014 Queer New York Arts Festival was opened with a work by Azcona entitled Someone Else. In this, physical contact with the artist was required to enter the venue of the event, which was held at Grace Exhibition Space and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York City. This work was chosen by critic Hrag Vartanian as one of the top ten of the year in New York City.
The Shame
Developed along the West Bank Wall in 2018, in The Shame Azcona installed original fragments of the Berlin Wall along the Israeli wall in the West Bank, which forms part of the barrier built throughout Israel to separate the Palestinian lands. Azcona made a metaphorical critique by merging both walls in the work. The actual installation, as if it were a piece of land art, currently remains along the wall, and has been exhibited in different countries through photographic and video art. The work has been criticized and denounced by Israel.
The Death of The Artist
The Death of the Artist was both a continuation of his earlier works and closure of the series, being performed in 2018 in the lobby of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. His previous works had caused Azcona to receive threats, as well as be the subject of persecution and acts of violence. The Círculo de Bellas Artes presented a complete reading of a manifesto titled The artist's presumption as a radical and disobedient subject, both in life and in death.
Spain Asks for Forgiveness
Spain Asks for Forgiveness is a conceptual and performative work of critical and anti-colonial. Created and started in Bogotá in November 2018 through a conference and a live performance by Azcona at the museum of contemporary art of Bogotá. In November 2018, through a conference and live performance by artist Abel Azcona in the Bogotá Contemporary Art Museum the work Spain Asks for Forgiveness (España os Pide Perdón in Spanish) began, a piece of critical and anticolonialist content. In the first action Azcona read a text of ninety two hours for more than four hours. In the reading the cite Spain Asks for Forgiveness was repeated continuously. Two months later, Azcona was invited to present his work in Mexico City in the Mexico City Museum, where he installed a sailcloth with the same sentence on it. Just a few days later the president of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador during a press conference demanded publicly an apology from Spain. Since then until mid 2020, the work has been shown in diverse ways and has achieved to become a collective movement. In May 2020 the Bogotá Contemporary Art Museum painted its facade with the installation's motto España os pide perdón for two months in the centre of the city of Bogotá. Other cities such as Havana, Cuba; Lima, Peru; Caracas, Venezuela; Panama City, Panama; Tegucigalpa, Honduras or Quito, Ecuador have been protagonists of the piece through paintings, sailcloths, posters or demonstrationa and collective acts continuing the work as a collective protest.
The Shadow
The Shadow is a conceptual work consisting of performance art, an installation, and photography, as a denunciation of dozens of child abuse cases. In the piece Azcona denounces child abuse by presenting the survivors as the protagonists. At each show, Azcona gave a live performance, from a wooden swing, of the experiences of the survivors.
Eating a Koran
Eating a Koran was first presented in October 2012 in the exhibition space of the College of Performing Arts of the University of the Arts in Berlin. Azcona began a series of works of a performative nature, which each criticise religious entities. In the works, Azcona used representative icons of various religions, such as the Koran, the Bible, the Torah and other objects of a sacred character. In the most controversial of them, Azcona performed for nine hours ingesting the pages of a copy of the Koran. This work provoked the most repercussions of any of the series, and the artist was threatened for the piece. The work was performed again in the Krudttønden, Copenhagen. From there, Azcona founded an art collection together with other artists such as Lars Vilks and Bjørn Nørgaard, who had been persecuted and threatened for their creations. With the collective of himself, Vilks, Nørgaard, the writer Salman Rushdie and the cartoonist Charb (who was killed in the Charlie Hebdo shooting), Azcona carried out performances and conferences about freedom of speech in the Krudttønden between 2013 and 2015. In 2015 the Krudttønden building was attacked by terrorists during one of the conferences. Subsequently, the work Eating a Koran was bought by a Danish collector and donated to the Krudttønden for the permanent exhibition.
Political Disorder
For Political Disorder, Azcona joined many different institutions and political parties. The work was made up of dozens of original documents of affiliation to dozens of political parties in Spain, membership cards or documentation of fees and payments. The piece, in which Azcona joins all the Spanish political parties, is a critique of the system that prioritizes economic interest over true ideology. Azcona joined Falange Española, Vox, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the Popular Party. He also became a member of entities with a political connotation such as the extreme right-wing organization Hazte Oír, the Francisco Franco National Foundation, the Spanish Nazi organization Hogar Social and the "Christian Lawyers". The multi-year project concluded at the Andrés-Missirlian Space Museum in Romainmôtier, Switzerland in 2017. In this exhibition, Azcona included the expulsion letters of each of the political parties and organizations.
Buried
Buried was created in 2015 through a public and participatory performance, or happening, on the esplanade of the Monument to the Fallen in Pamplona. Azcona invited dozens of relatives of Republicans who were shot, persecuted or disappeared during the Spanish Civil War. Descendants of victims make up the installation in a row in front of the monument, all symbolically buried with soil from the garden of one of the participants, where his relatives had been shot. In 2016, the city of Pamplona invited Azcona to show his work inside the Monument and the project was recreated there, after it had been converted into an exhibition hall, under the title Unearthed: A retrospective view on the political and subversive work of the artist Abel Azcona. The exhibition brought together the Buried project and fragments of all of Azcona's works.
There are symbols that cannot be covered. The Monument to the Fallen of Pamplona is a clear example. Fighting this symbol with another is what Navarrese artist Abel Azcona has proposed, known for his performance, sometimes controversial and often linked to the body. In this case, Azcona does not propose this new art exhibition as a war between symbols, but as an invitation to arouse feelings and, also, as a claim. For him, it is about inciting memory, individual and collective (and, therefore, historical).
Desafectos
In 2016, Azcona coordinated a new performative action, or happening, with relatives of those who were shot in the Pozos de Caudé. Under the name of Desafectos, Azcona formed a wall with the relatives as a complaint, next to the wells outside the city of Teruel, where more than a thousand people had been shot over the course of three days during the Civil War.
The Nine Confinements or The Deprivation of Liberty
The Nine Confinements, also known as The Deprivation of Liberty, was a sequence of performances carried out between 2013 and 2016. All of the series had a theme of deprivation of liberty. The first in the series was performed by Azcona in 2013 and named Confinement in Search of Identity. The artist was to remain for 60 days in a space built inside an art gallery of Madrid, with scarce food resources and in total darkness. The performance was stopped after 42 days for health reasons, with Azcona being subsequently hospitalised. Azcona created these works as a reflection and also a discursive interruption of his own mental illness; themes of mental illness are often present in Azcona's work. Another of the confinements lasted nine days in the Lyon Biennale. Azcona remained inside a garbage container strategically located in the center of the Biennale as a criticism of the artist's own gestation and the market of contemporary art itself. One of the last projects of the series was Black Hole. Performed in 2015, Azcona again remained locked in a small space without light and with poor food in the same art gallery in Madrid. On this occasion, different unknown guests shared the confinement with the artist. Azcona was unaware of the guests' origins and could not see them. Visitors of the art gallery were told of the experience by those entering and leaving the confinement with the artist. All projects were curated and documented from the point of view of the deprivation of liberty including deprivation of food, water, electricity, and contact with the outside.
Style
Azcona's works push his body to the limit and are usually related to social issues. Azcona states that within his works he pursues an end beyond the purely aesthetic. His intent with his works is to question the viewer and force them to react, making his own body the representation of critical and political subjects. The themes of most of his performances are autobiographical and focused on issues such as abandonment, violence, abuse, mental illness, deprivation of liberty, and life and death. A characteristic of Azcona's work is that he conceives his pieces as process art, which implies that they are of a long duration. Many of his works are created starting with what he calls "a detoner" and, from that first performance, new movements and protests arise, which make the piece discursive.
