Ana Teresa Ortega, National Photography Award 2020, at the MUN: "I speak of the construction of memory and the need for its constant re-edification".

Ana Teresa Ortega, winner of the 2020 National Photography Award, presented this Wednesday in the Museo Universidad de Navarra the exhibition Past and present, the memory and its constructionwhich covers her works from the 90s to the present, some of them unpublished to date. In the words of the artist, born in Alicante in 1952, "it is the first time you can see this selection of projects creating synergies and relationships between them, dialoguing in an exhibition context". 

The exhibition, co-produced with the Consorci de Museus de la Comunitat Valenciana and curated by Pep Benlloch, is the result of the public call of the Consorci de Museus Trajectòries, which aims to review the career of artists and collectives of the Valencian Community, highlighting the work of creators like Ana Teresa Ortega and their contributions to Spanish contemporary art. In it, the author invites reflection on issues such as the construction of individual and collective memory, exile, identity and literature as a guardian of memory.

DIVERSE AND COMMITTED WORK

With a chronological approach, the exhibition allows to know in depth this photographic work, diverse and committed, which can be visited on the -1 floor of the Museum until October 10. At the presentation, the artist was accompanied by Pep Benlloch, curator of the exhibition, and Valentín Vallhonrat, artistic director of Museo Universidad de Navarra.

In his speech, Vallhonrat stressed that this is an exhibition in which the visitor will find "magnificent findings" in an exhibition project that "deals with issues that are difficult to name, such as historical memory, which is our emotional memory, where we come from and what we are". He also invites the public to "stop, reflect and enjoy".

For his part, the curator stressed that "being able to contemplate these projects as a whole helps us to see the choice of media according to the idea he wants to convey. It exemplifies how he has been using the supports and how they have been evolving". Thus, the exhibition brings together photography, photo-sculpture, projections and installations.

Trained in sculpture, but passionate about photography since its inception, Ortega explained that "the only way to combine both expressive resources was to expand photography, to leave the frame, the support. In this sense, he recalled that, in his beginnings, he resorted to "opaque images, printed on canvas, and later on transparent supports, methacrylates and glass that acquired a certain visual lightness. The choice of support makes it easier to insert the viewer because they work almost like mirrors in which we see ourselves reflected.

Likewise, Ortega has indicated that the installation works allow him "to talk not only about memory as a shaper of our collective identity, but also about written culture. I was able to base my work on books, on the figure of reading, on bookstores and libraries as memory deposits". In this line, the proposal also includes a series dedicated to "illustrious writers and thinkers who represent the writing of the 20th century, united by their condition as exiles, forced or voluntary".

In this line, he also pointed out that the expanded photograph on the wall allows him to "speak of a construction of memory and the need for its constant rebuilding. It is often fragile and easy to lose. That is why we need to rebuild it each time. As a symbolic figure, we use the image of a library and we symbolize the accumulated deposit of memory as a way of shaping the human being".

The exhibition also includes a series of projects that cover the SecondRepublic, the Civil War and Franco's dictatorship. "As apprentices of history, we see many gaps and voids to fill. In these projects there has been an attempt to fill them, question them, make them visible and learn from them." Thus, Ortega travels in these works through prisons set up in the postwar period, public works born of forced labor and scenarios of scientific exile.

In total, the exhibition, which can be visited without a fixed itinerary, includes the following series: Photo-sculptures; Figures of exile; The library, a metaphor of time; Gardens of memory; Thinkers; Silenced cartographies; Of forced labor; Places of knowledge and scientific exile; and Shadowy presences, memory again.