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 (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.
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.
Selected artistic works
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.
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 La Habana, Cuba; Lima, Perú; Caracas, Venezuela; Ciudad de Panamá, Panamá; 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.
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.
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.
Selected filmography
- Antibasque (2014). Directed by Karlos Alastruey. Documentary about the Basque conflict designed following Abel Azcona's performance in Basque lands.
- The Miracle (2015). Directed by Abel Azcona. Video art piece generated from the performance The Miracle, documentation of the art work developed in different Mediterranean Beaches.
- Abel Azcona: Born In Darkness (2016). Directed by Karlos Alastruey. Documentary about life and artwork of Abel Azcona.
- A day in the life of Abel Azcona (2016). Documentary about one day in the life of the artist Abel Azcona.
- Still Life (2017). Directed by Abel Azcona. Video art piece generated from the Still Life Art Project, developed in Roca Umbert Museum by Abel Azcona.
- The Fathers (2017). Directed by Abel Azcona. Video Art Piece generated from the artwork The Fathers, documentation of the performance art developed in an art gallery in Madrid.
- In Harm's Way (2017). Directed by Abel Azcona. Video art piece directed by Abel Azcona for music video of the singer Amanda Palmer on the drama of the refugees in the Mediterranean Sea.
- The Shame (2018). Directed by Abel Azcona. Videoart piece generated from The Shame performance, generated along the West Bank Wall.
- You will be a man (2018). Directed by Isabel de Ocampo. Documentary about new masculinities and the search for origins of Abel Azcona.
- Abel Azcona: Creadorxs (2018). Directed by Neurads for El País. Documentary chapter about life and artwork of Abel Azcona.
See also
In Spanish: Abel Azcona para niños
