Art and memory: Toni Giró

Art and Memory. Contemporary Art Projects

Toni Giró

Global Poem, 2010

HD video (combination of 180 images that generate 4,048 combinations) and artist’s book on iron shelf.

The universe of war and its visual representation provide the background for Toni Giró’s “Global Poem”. Based on the random Internet search for images linked to military operations from World War Two to the present, an absurd and parodic visual aesthetics is constructed revealing that concealed behind some apparently innocuous words are violence, pain and death. This work, which continues and updates the tradition of the photomontage technique from the 1920s and 1930s, has the capacity to link disparate visual snapshots found on the Web with equally disparate captions, those of military operations. Using subtle irony, the visual poems warn of the fact that war – and its representations – often passes through the collective imaginary with a status of banality that does not correspond to the suffering it engenders.

Toni Giró (Barcelona, 1966) is an artist who graduated from the University of Barcelona with a degree in Fine Arts. He majored in sculpture and since the 1990s his work has evolved from sculptural forms to the field of multimedia installation, with a progressively central role of video and photography. With neo-conceptualist approaches, Toni Giró develops projects based on critical observation of the contemporary world. He has exhibited his work in cities such as Barcelona, Berlin, Girona, Madrid and Valencia, among others. In 2008 he received the ACCA (Associació Catalana de Crítics d’Art) award for the exhibition “Action must not be reaction but creation”.

From 31st October 2011 to 26th February 2012

MUME Hall