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ARGOT 22 May - 2 Aug CAAM - San Antonio Abad Concha Jerez y José Iges CAAM, in collaboration with the Cervantes Institute The headquarters of the Cervantes Institute in Frankfurt (September to October 2009) and their headquarters in Brussels (November to December 2009). In 2010 the exhibition is set to travel to the Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico, with the collaboration of the Spanish Agency of International Cooperation for Development (AECID). . |
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CAAM PRESENT THE EXHIBITION "ARGOT - Concha Jerez / José Iges" IN SAN ANTONIO ABAD 
Concha Jerez and José Iges approach this challenge as a deconstructive treatment of the original text – a discourse on art and the artist – which is entirely self-referential, since the work is essentially based on this text and its sound, expanded and transformed in both space and time. For the CAAM, this project constitutes an attractive opportunity to host a contemporary sound creation and to collaborate in the Argot project, a work which was first conceived for the old Museum Moderner Kunst building in Vienna (1991), where it was proposed as an intervention in and transgression of two powerful media: the museum and the radio. Subsequent incarnations appeared in Cologne (1992), as an intermedia, aural and visual installation, and on the terrace of the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela (2008), as a sound installation, with computer-controlled multi-channel audio.
In 1992 a second step in the process was taken and the work took on the form of an intermedia installation, both aural and visual, in the international show FLUXUS VIRUS, curated in Cologne by Christel Schüppenhauer under the name Argot 2. Intermedia Laberynth (2). In addition to the corresponding documentary elements (diagrams and book/musical score) from the first production of the work, a piece consisting in a drawing-diagram corresponding to the 1991 work was subsequently produced, and a multiple representing this formulation was also produced with the gallerist. In this same year, 1992, Concha Jerez performed LABERINTO LÍMITE in the Salón del Estudiante, Granada.More recently, a piece made up of five digital photomontages was created, showing the base text of the work, in Spanish, laid over the top of images of the ARGOT interventions in the Museum Moderner Kunst. In the summer of 2008, a new ARGOT formulation took shape, that of a sound installation in the terrace space of the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela, in multi-channel audio format and controlled by computer, of material taken from the original version.
Presentation of exhibition catalog ARGOT. Concha Jerez/José Iges  Tuesday July 21, 2009 - 20,00 hours
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Concha Jerez and José Iges have agreed to participate in the artist-curator programme organised by the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM) of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria for its Sala San Antonio Abad site, with a new interpretation of their project, Argot. Their decision to do so was based on the premise of giving priority to the experimental nature of the project and the idea of adopting the exhibition space as an integral part of the artistic creation; a space of transformation and transcendence. This position demands the rewriting of the work, showing it as the result of the artists' reflection upon the museum space and the piece itself - a fruitful dialogue that in turn constitutes another step in the piece's progression, implying its reformulation and new strategies for its dissemination.
This time round, the essential threads of the diverse stages of the work - base text, musical score, initial project, diagrams, multiple - have been integrated and are joined by new digital photomontages and two sound installations that set up a dialogue with the specific spaces of the building and with the diverse elements that comprise the exhibition. In addition, new journeys are being prepared for, in which this new configuration of Argot will need to adapt to the spaces of the Cervantes Institutes of Frankfurt and Brussels and the Fonoteca Nacional in Mexico. 
The initial work, however, had already brought together the complementary artistic capabilities of the two artists perfectly: the installation artist and performer Concha Jerez (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1941) and the sound and radio artist José Iges (Madrid, 1951). The central thread of the piece is a text, in four languages (German, French, Spanish and English), discussing the artist and their work, to which the spelling-out of the phonetic alphabet is added, in these same four languages. 
