Jorge Galindo and Santiago Sierra

Los encargados, 2012, 
5 min 55 s, b/w, sound (music: Varshavianka, Waclaw Święcicki)
Courtesy of the artists and Helga de Alvear gallery

Los Encargados is an anti-music-video, filmed in black and white, which makes use of Varshavianka as background music to stage a performance with a marked political content. Filmed in the early morning of 15 August last summer, the images depict a procession of seven official cars crowned with gigantic portraits placed face down and also painted in black and white by Jorge Galindo from official photographs. The first is of King Juan Carlos. It is followed by the faces of the presidents of the successive governments since the Transition: Adolfo Suárez, Leopoldo Calvo-Sotelo, Felipe González, José María Aznar, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and Mariano Rajoy. These, in the words of Santiago Sierra, are the visible faces of the regime, ‘the faces of the people who represent the interests of the banks, the Pentagon, Rome, the landowners, the Army’... Galindo claims they are all liable for ‘murderous policies’. ‘We must speak out clearly: there are people dying and thousands more have been robbed and thrown out of their homes. This evil has a beginning and we’re talking about the swindle of the Transition, directed by the political elites of the Franco regime to last until our day. We point a finger at the perpetrators of this great fraud.’

Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys

Dara Birnbaum

Dara Birnbaum

John Sanborn, Kit Fitzgerald (Antarctica)

John Sanborn, Kit Fitzgerald (Antarctica)

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist

Bjørn Melhus

Bjørn Melhus

Charley Case

Charley Case

Olaf Breuning

Olaf Breuning

Cheryl Donegan

Cheryl Donegan

Ana Laura Aláez

Ana Laura Aláez

Marc Bijl

Marc Bijl

Carles Congost

Carles Congost

Joan Morey

Joan Morey

 Adel Abidin

Adel Abidin

Hugo Alonso

Hugo Alonso

Charles Atlas

Charles Atlas

Jesús Hernández

Jesús Hernández

César Pesquera

César Pesquera

Jorge Galindo and Santiago Sierra

Jorge Galindo and Santiago Sierra

The Notions of Race Fred Wilson

The Notions of Race Fred Wilson

Pera Museum, in collaboration with Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), is one of the main venues for this year’s 15th Istanbul Biennial from 16 September to 12 November 2017.

Istanbul-Paris-Istanbul: Mario Prassinos

Istanbul-Paris-Istanbul: Mario Prassinos

Mario Prassinos liked Istanbul more than the current Istanbulites of today. It is obvious that you can understand this from the article written by her daughter Catherine Prassinos in the Pera Museum's book on the artist.

Souvenirs of the Future

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You try to remember the future. A bird painted on the ceramic panel in a historical palace has found its place on the wall. The tiles of a church and a mosque have been painted on canvas. The pattern of a centuries-old ceramic plate appears before you on a velvet curtain.