• Three internationally prestigious artists, coming from very diverse geographical and cultural contexts, engage in an emotional, corporal or political dialogue with their immediate environs and the communities that inhabit them.
• Centro Botín continues its support for contemporary creation with its Art Grants and the annual Itinerarios exhibition, which is celebrating its twenty-ninth anniversary this year. Shilpa Gupta and Shimabuku will each lead an Art Workshop, continuing Fundación Botín’s mission to enrich the artistic community and support the training of contemporary artists.
• With Silvia Bächli’s exhibition, Fundación Botín furthers its commitment to the practice of drawing, which started in 2006 with research into the great Spanish masters and continued in 2017 with the exhibition of drawings by Francisco de Goya at Centro Botín. Today, drawing is still prevalent in the collection, encompassing other regions and contemporary contexts, with examples such as Julie Mehretu, Manolo Millares and Juan Muñoz.

Centro Botín’s exhibition programme for the upcoming year will bring the works of three internationally renowned artists to Santander, who are presenting large scale exhibitions for the first time in Spain. Centro Botín strengthens its steadfast commitment to offer residents of Santander and Cantabria the possibility of engaging with works by artists with extensive international careers, while also enriching the national art scene.

During the spring and summer of 2024, Centro Botín will invoke the world of music in contemporary art through Shilpa Gupta’s moving songs of protest and hope and Silvia Bächli’s visual scores, created through mural drawing compositions. In the fall, Shimabuku’s humorous performative works will examine the local stories, nonhuman beings and the sea, continuing Centro Botín’s exhibition programme’s commitment to engage with the environment and nature around Santander.

According to Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, the director of Exhibitions and Centro Botín Collection and member of the Art Advisory Committee: ‘the exhibitions we have programmed for 2024 reflect the international, innovative scope of Centro Botín. We are offering three very distinct individual presentations by artists from India, Switzerland and Japan who are defined by their performative languages, poetic precision and keen attention on audiences perception. I am really excited about the launch of the programme in the spring of 2024, when we will engage with music, which will inundate both our bodies in Gupta’s space of shared listening and our imagination through Bächli’s visual scores. I am also very pleased to offer our visitors the sincere humour in Shimabuku’s works, which stems from the surprising relationships he forges with nonhuman beings, like an octopus or a mermaid. These exhibitions will also be in tandem with a new Itinerarios exhibition, our yearly program supporting Spanish and international artists in the research and production of new projects.’

The calls for applications for the thirtieth Art Grants and the seventeenth Museum Management and Exhibition Curatorship Grants will open in February. Shilpa Gupta and Shimabuku are each planning to hold an Art Workshop, in line with the Fundación Botín’s mission to enrich the artistic community and support the training of contemporary creators.

CENTRO BOTÍN – EXHIBITION CALENDAR FOR 2023

SHILPA GUPTA, I Live Under Your Sky Too. Room 2

Curator: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, director of Exhibitions and the Collection, Centro Botín.

23 March – 8 September 2024

Press view: 22 March 2024

Centro Botín´s 2024 Spring/Summer programme begins with I Live Under Your Sky Too, a solo presentation of the internationally acclaimed Indian artist Shilpa Gupta.This will be the artist’s first exhibition in Spain.

The central work of this exhibition is a new, ambitious sound space, fusing text and sculpture in a choreographed, in-motion installation titled Listening Air. It comprises of a set of suspended microphones, each counterbalanced by a dimly lit light fixture, which orbit throughout the darkened gallery and between visitors. Subverting their connotations, the microphones-turned-speakers make audible words that have resonated across landscapes from rice fields to forests, streets and universities. The work includes, among others, a piece by Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz that has recently been sung on campuses across India, and an Italian activist song, originally sung by female rice-paddy labourers, that found revival in the past years’ farmers’ protests in India. The perception of language and song thus becomes a shared physical experience in which visitors become part of the installation’s choreography, experiencing, and reacting to the recorded voices.

Alongside this major new work, will be a series of recent related works including drawing, text, sculpture and textile which give form to the physical, emotional and ideological existence of boundaries. Exploring nation states, ethno-religious divides or structures of surveillance and isolation, Gupta’s emotive and focused works transverse these interstitial zones giving voice to hope, resilience, passion and protest.

Ahead of the exhibition opening, Gupta will engage artists and art educators to participate in Fundación Botín´s Art Workshop programme. Accompanying each major show at Centro Botín, exhibiting artists are invited to lead a residency programme with selected cultural practitioners. Participants take part in an immersive residency-style opportunity – living, communing, thinking, writing and creating – under the guidance of the host artist. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue with texts by art historian and curator Rattanamol Johal and artist Maria Salgado.

**Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976, Mumbai, India) lives and works in Mumbai, where she studied B.F.A. Sculpture at Sir J. J. School of Fine Arts, graduating in 1997. Gupta’s work has exhibited around the world including the Venice Biennale, Berlin Biennale, Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Devi Art Foundation, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Mori Museum amongst others.

SILVIA BÄCHLI: PARTITURA

Curator: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, director of Exhibitions and the Collection, Centro Botín.

11 May – 20 October 2024, Room 1

Press view: 10 May 2024

This exhibition will premier new works by Swiss artist Silvia Bächli and will shed light on both the continuity and the progressive changes that occur in her work: from the simple studies of body fragments in black and white to her various interpretations of the grid structure. The exhibition includes works from her presentation at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009 as well as a room dedicated to a new series of expansive coloured surfaces, or “colour fields.” This will be the artist’s first institutional exhibition in Spain. Bächli will also be the focus of a solo exhibition at the Kunst Museum Winterthur in Switzerland, opening May 2024.

Bächli developed her drawing practice working with modest and limiting means: sheets of white paper manufactured for book printing of different sizes, qualities and tones, and using Indian ink, charcoal, gouache or pastels. The artist takes her body, its movements and the objects that surround her as a starting point to create wall compositions that function like musical scores made up of fragments, intervals, rhythms and silences. Her approach to drawing is sequential as the artist draws on sheets from a pile, one after another, arranging constellations of works on her studio wall that are consecutively interrogated, rearranged, rejected, until she discovers something that feels right and surprising.

The exhibition continues Centro Botín´s commitment to drawing practices, which started with scholarly and curatorial research on Francisco Goya and Manolo Millares and expanded to other regions and contemporary contexts with Julie Mehretu and Juan Muñoz. The show will be accompanied by a catalogue in English and Spanish (the first catalogue of the artist written in Spanish) designed by Manuel Raeder (BOM DIA). It will include newly commissioned texts by poet and critic Quinn Latimer, writer Chris Fite-Wassilak and a conversation between Silvia Bächli and Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz.

**Silvia Bächli (Baden, Switzerland, 1956). She lives and works in Basel. Important solo exhibitions have been dedicated to her including Museum Langmatt, Baden, Switzerland (2023); Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany (2022), Fidelidade Arte, Lisbona (2021) and Culturgest, Porto (2021); Fondation espace écureuil, Printemps de septembre, Toulouse (2021), Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (2019); Centre culturel suisse, Paris (2017, with Eric Hattan); Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2014); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2012).

SHIMABUKU

5 October 2024 – February 2025. Room 2

Press view: 4   October 2024

Centro Botín will present the first solo exhibition in Spain of Japanese artist Shimabuku, known for his affective and thought provoking work across a diverse range of media including sculpture, film and photography. Full of poetic sentiment and humour, while also inspiring people in metaphorical ways, his style has gained worldwide recognition.

From the beginning of the 1990s, Shimabuku travelled to various places in Japan and overseas, creating works and performance that consider the daily lives and cultures of people he encounters, as well as new forms of communication between us and with non-human beings. For his exhibition at Centro Botín, the artist will engage with the natural and gastronomic worlds that surround it, all located in the Cantabrian shores.

Shimabuku will also conceptualise and direct a Fundación Botín Art Workshop. Accompanying each major show at Centro Botín, exhibiting artists are invited to lead a residency programme with selected cultural practitioners. Participants take part in an immersive residency-style opportunity – living, communing, thinking, writing and creating together – under the guidance of the host artist.

**Shimabuku (Born in Kobe, Japan 1969. Lives in Naha, Okinawa, Japan). Recent solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle Bern (2014), NMNM Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2021), Wiels, Brussels, Belgium (2022) and MUSEION: Museum of modern and contemporary art, Bolzano, Italy (2023). Group exhibitions include, Centre Pompidou in Paris and Hayward Gallery in London, and in numerous international exhibitions including Venice Biennale (2003 & 2017), the São Paulo Biennial (2006), Havana Biennal (2015) and Lyon Biennale (2017).

ITINERARIOS XXIX

23 November 2024 – March 2025. Room 1

Press view: Friday 22 November

Since 1993, Fundación Botín has awarded the Fundación Botín Art Grant to support Spanish and international artists in the research and production of new projects. The annual exhibition Itinerarios is the culmination of this grant, reflecting a broad range of interests and artistic practices. Itinerarios XIX presents the projects of the six artists selected by an external jury for the 2022 application calls. Each project displayed should be understood as a work in itself, and as a unique invitation to engage with the languages and networks that the artists have been working over the last two years.

With all of this, the twenty-ninth edition of Itinerarios will present the works of Alice Correia Lourenço dos Reis (Lisbon, Portugal, 1995), Patricia Domínguez (Santiago de Chile, Chile 1984), María Salgado (Madrid, Spain, 1984) and Clarisa Navas (Corrientes, Argentina, 1989), Antonio Menchen (Toledo, Spain, 1983), Belén Rodríguez González (Valladolid, Spain, 1981) and Laura Fernández Antolín (Valladolid, Spain, 1993). The jury in charge of choosing the projects was made up of Aimar Arriola and Soledad González, curators and researchers, along with the artists Joâo Onofre and Eva Fábregas, both of whom have been awarded these grants in the past.

This decision stands out for the diversity of practices chosen, which range from performance to more traditional techniques reinvented through contemporary practice; from attention to subtlety and handiwork in the works of Belén Rodríguez González and Antonio Menchen to the more cosmic in the videos by Patricia Domínguez and Alice Correia Lourenço dos Reis, along with the project by María Salgado, who worked with the filmmaker Clarisa Navas to intertwine language and image, associating people and places that are related with their biographies. Likewise, Laura Fernández Antolín’s work will explore new ways of approaching materiality through paganism.