Carmen Roca Igual

AJO BLANCO, TIKTOK & TALK

with Sergi Rusca

Background evening

23/09/2022

19:00

On Friday, September 23rd, the public was welcome at 1646 to join the Spanish patio and get a taste of what’s behind Carmen’s exhibition and work. During the Background Evening, we looked at the artist’s practice from a slightly different angle, and experienced it differently.

A digitalised world makes us all actors of our appearances, while we blend with our technologies. Through two new video installations in her exhibition Tan lines from a Spiritual Retweet at 1646, Carmen Roca Igual explores the meaning of getting to know oneself by trying on different masks and personas, having the possibility to continuously reinvent and explore the self.

With a bowl of traditional Spanish ‘Ajo Blanco’ grape soup in our hands, we watched the recreation of Carmen’s film Apatía y Devoción, by means of a TikTok video compilation. Carmen also went into conversation with Sergi Rusca, to talk about her works’ ins and outs.

To join in on the self-exploration fun, the public could make their own TikTok video, recreating one of the scenes from Carmen’s film with a special sound-filter. Become the actor of your own appearance and try on a different persona, and start exploring as well! Click this link for instructions.

The Background Evening took place during Hoogtij #70.

Info

About Carmen Roca Igual: Carmen de la Roca (b. 1998, Paris) is a lens-based artist researching human behaviour and the social makeup we apply in relation to new media. Her work combines identity, technology, empowerment and the role of new media, but also the essential pursuit of communication, spirituality, and connection that most humans are in search of. She researches and explores experiences through fictional characters as a proxy to hers and society’s dilemmas. The characters live through contemporary narratives as they discover how to utilise the content they create in this attention economy.

Roca Igual graduated from the Royal Academy of Art The Hague in 2020. Her work was officially selected for the #AmLatino Film Festival and was nominated for the Young Talent Award during Dutch Design Week. She has assisted artists and filmmakers Amalia Ulman and Pauline Curnier Jardin, and her work was shown before in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rijeka, and The Hague.

About Sergi Rusca (Barcelona, 1996) is a curator and writer. After finishing a bachelor’s in Art History in Barcelona, he moved to The Netherlands to pursue a master’s degree in Arts and Society at Universiteit Utrecht. His practice focuses on intersectional ecology and its political, material, poetic, and queer dimensions. He currently works at RADIUS, Center for Contemporary Art and Ecology, Delft, and at Ellen de Bruijne PROJECTS, Amsterdam.

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