Empathy and Prostitution Empathy and Prostitution is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. It was created and first performed in the
Santa Fe Gallery,
Bogotá, in February 2013. The work had a second performance at the Factoría de Arte y Desarrollo, an artistic space in Madrid, in November 2013, and there was a third performance at the Houston International Performance Biennial, in February 2014. Azcona was inspired by his biological mother, a prostitute, and sought to empathise with her and with the moment of his own conception. Azcona offered himself naked to the galleries' visitors on a bed with white sheets, so that they could exchange intimacy or have sexual relations with him. Photographs, drawings and documentation of the work were part of the
Art Is Hope charity exhibitions in
Paris and
Pride in New York. The depictions of the performance piece have been exhibited in museums such as the
Palais de Tokyo and the
Perrotin Gallery, and also displayed at the
Piasa auction house in Paris. The New York exhibition and auction at
Paddle8 promoted sexual diversity and featured artists such as
Haring,
Bourgeois,
Goldin,
Mapplethorpe,
Warhol, and Azcona himself. In 2017 there were also exhibitions in museums such as the Tulla Center in the
Albanian capital
Tirana. The Juan Gallery in Madrid, which specializes in performance art, included this work in a retrospective exhibition,
The Extinction of Desire, which focused on works with sexual themes.
Someone Else Someone Else is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. Following on with the same concepts as
Empathy and Prostitution, the inaugural 2014 Queer New York Arts Festival was opened with a work by Azcona entitled
Someone Else. In this, physical or even sexual contact with the artist was required to enter the venue of the event, which was held at Grace Exhibition Space and the
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in
New York City. This work was chosen by critic
Hrag Vartanian as one of the top ten of the year in New York City.
The War The War is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. In 2016, Azcona activated his last sex-themed piece in this series,
La Guerra (
The War), which premiered at the Intramurs Festival in
Valencia, Spain, which was again inspired by prostitution, criticism and sexuality. On this occasion, Azcona offered his naked body,
anesthetized by the use of
narcotics, so that the visitors could use it freely.
The Streets The Streets (
La Calle; "the sexual exchange") is a conceptual and performative work of critical and biographical content. At the end of 2014 and the early part of 2015, Azcona performed the work as a process where he prostitutes himself on the streets. In it, he explored a change towards becoming the figure of his mother, taking
hormones and engaging in prostitution. It began in the Santa Fe neighborhood of Bogotá, with the process continuing in the cities of Madrid and
Mexico City. The performance emerged, as with the rest of his sex-themed works, as an exercise in empathy with his own biological mother. It was also a social critique, where the artist explored the limits of his body by repeating patterns of sexual abuse, things which occurred in his own childhood and in the life of his mother. In addition, the Círculo de Bellas Artes presented a complete reading of a
manifesto titled ''The artist's presumption as a radical and disobedient subject, both in life and in death''.
Amen or The Pederasty Although named
Amen by Azcona himself, the work is more commonly known as
The Pederasty (“
La pederastia” in Spanish). Over a period of several months in 2015, Azcona attended
Eucharists in churches and parishes that were linked to his own childhood. Azcona kept the
consecrated hosts given to the attendees of the
communion from the churches, gathering 242 hosts; this was the number of cases of
pederasty reported in the north of Spain during the previous decade. With the hosts, he made a work in which the word
Pederastia (Pederasty in English) could be read. The work was first exhibited in Madrid in the summer of 2015. At the end of 2015, a section of the work was selected to be part of a retrospective exhibition of Azcona's works inside the city of Pamplona's Monument to the Fallen of the
Spanish Civil War. The work was located on the
altar of the old monument, which was formerly the cathedral of Pamplona; at the time of the show, it had already been
desacralized. The day after the inauguration of the exhibition, multiple demonstrations and demands for its closure occurred. On multiple occasions, the Catholic Church called the work a great offense to
Christian belief. Azcona documented all the situations of confrontation and included them in other exhibitions of the work. He also endured more than five years of judicial proceedings for various complaints about the work at different courts and judicial entities. The work has been exhibited in museums in
Berga,
Mallorca,
Murcia, Madrid and
Lleida. The latest exhibition in Lleida was presented in
Tatxo Benet's collection, which included works by Azcona,
Ai Weiwei,
Francisco de Goya,
Robert Mapplethorpe and
Andres Serrano.
Spain Asks for Forgiveness Spain Asks for Forgiveness is a conceptual and performative work of critical and
anti-colonial. Created and started in Bogotá in November 2018 through a conference and a live performance by Azcona at the museum of
contemporary art of
Bogotá. In November 2018, through a conference and live performance by artist Abel Azcona in the
Bogotá Contemporary Art Museum the work
Spain Asks for Forgiveness (
España os Pide Perdón in Spanish) began, a piece of critical and anticolonialist content. In the first action Azcona read a text of ninety two hours for more than four hours. In the reading the cite
Spain Asks for Forgiveness was repeated continuously. Two months later, Azcona was invited to present his work in Mexico City in the Mexico City Museum, where he installed a sailcloth with the same sentence on it. Just a few days later the president of Mexico
Andrés Manuel López Obrador during a press conference demanded publicly an apology from Spain. Since then until mid 2020, the work has been shown in diverse ways and has achieved to become a collective movement. In May 2020 the
Bogotá Contemporary Art Museum painted its facade with the installation's motto
España os pide perdón for two months in the centre of the city of
Bogotá. Other cities such as
Havana, Cuba;
Lima, Peru;
Caracas, Venezuela;
Panama City, Panama;
Tegucigalpa, Honduras or
Quito, Ecuador have been protagonists of the piece through paintings, sailcloths, posters or demonstrations and collective acts continuing the work as a collective protest.
The Shadow The Shadow is a conceptual work consisting of performance art, an installation, and photography, as a denunciation of dozens of child abuse cases. In the piece Azcona denounces child abuse by presenting the survivors as the protagonists. In the work, Azcona presented more than two hundred actual cases of pedophilia in museums and galleries in various cities in Spain. At each show, Azcona gave a live performance, from a wooden swing, of the experiences of the survivors. The work was performed again in the
Krudttønden,
Copenhagen. From there, Azcona founded an art collection together with other artists such as
Lars Vilks and
Bjørn Nørgaard, who had been persecuted and threatened for their creations. With the collective of himself, Vilks, Nørgaard, the writer
Salman Rushdie and the cartoonist
Charb (who was killed in the
Charlie Hebdo shooting), Azcona carried out performances and conferences about freedom of speech in the Krudttønden between 2013 and 2015. In 2015 the Krudttønden building was
attacked by terrorists during one of the conferences. Subsequently, the work
Eating a Koran was bought by a Danish collector and donated to the Krudttønden for the permanent exhibition.
The Fathers The Fathers was first performed in 2016 in Madrid with the final performance, also in Madrid, in 2017; it was in an exhibition format. The piece included dozens of female former prostitutes who gave a physical description of their last
client. On the other side of a long table,
composite artists listened to them and drew images of the clients. The performance generated dozens of portraits which, at the closing of the work in 2017, were exhibited with the premise that any of them could be Azcona's father. The biographical work creates a critical discourse with prostitution and its inheritance, and in the case of Azcona himself, of an unknown father, having been conceived during an act of prostitution.
Political Disorder For
Political Disorder, Azcona joined many different institutions and
political parties. The work was made up of dozens of original documents of affiliation to dozens of political parties in Spain, membership cards or documentation of fees and payments. The piece, in which Azcona joins all the Spanish political parties, is a critique of the system that prioritizes economic interest over true ideology. Azcona joined
Falange Española,
Vox, the
Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the
Popular Party. He also became a member of entities with a political connotation such as the
extreme right-wing organization
Hazte Oír, the
Francisco Franco National Foundation, the Spanish Nazi organization
Hogar Social and the "Christian Lawyers". In this exhibition, Azcona included the expulsion letters of each of the political parties and organizations.
Buried Buried was created in 2015 through a public and participatory performance, or
happening, on the esplanade of the Monument to the Fallen in Pamplona. Azcona invited dozens of relatives of
Republicans who were shot, persecuted or disappeared during the Spanish Civil War. Descendants of victims make up the installation in a row in front of the monument, all symbolically buried with soil from the garden of one of the participants, where his relatives had been shot. In 2016, the city of Pamplona invited Azcona to show his work inside the Monument and the project was recreated there, after it had been converted into an exhibition hall, under the title
Unearthed: A retrospective view on the political and subversive work of the artist Abel Azcona. The exhibition brought together the
Buried project and fragments of all of Azcona's works.
Desafectos In 2016, Azcona coordinated a new performative action, or happening, with relatives of those who were shot in the
Pozos de Caudé. Under the name of
Desafectos, Azcona formed a wall with the relatives as a complaint, next to the wells outside the city of
Teruel, where more than a thousand people had been shot and thrown into the wells over the course of three days during the Civil War.
The Nine Confinements or The Deprivation of Liberty The Nine Confinements, also known as
The Deprivation of Liberty, was a sequence of performances carried out between 2013 and 2016. All of the series had a theme of
deprivation of liberty. The first in the series was performed by Azcona in 2013 and named
Confinement in Search of Identity. The artist was to remain for 60 days in a space built inside an art gallery of Madrid, with scarce food resources and in total darkness. The performance was stopped after 42 days for health reasons, with Azcona being subsequently hospitalised. Azcona created these works as a reflection and also a discursive interruption of his own mental illness; Another of the confinements lasted nine days in the
Lyon Biennale. Azcona remained inside a garbage container strategically located in the center of the Biennale as a criticism of the artist's own gestation and the market of contemporary art itself. One of the last projects of the series was
Black Hole. Performed in 2015, Azcona again remained locked in a small space without light and with poor food in the same art gallery in Madrid. On this occasion, different unknown guests shared the confinement with the artist. Azcona was unaware of the guests' origins and could not see them. Visitors of the art gallery were told of the experience by those entering and leaving the confinement with the artist. All projects were curated and documented from the point of view of the deprivation of liberty including deprivation of food, water, electricity, and contact with the outside. == Style ==