Mar Canet and Varvara Guljajeva they have done an artistic residency at the Abelló Museum
Mar Canet i Solà, an artist from Mollet and resident in Estonia, and his partner Varvara Guljajeva, have been doing an artistic residency at the Abelló Museum, he as a student at the Baltic Film, Media and Arts School (BFM) of the University of Tallinn, Estonia, where she is pursuing her PhD and is part of the CUDAN research group, and Varvara Guljajeva with the support of Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
The two institutions have supported the Sea and the Varvara, and they have carried out the research residency at the Abelló Museum in order to work with the photographic archive of Joan Abelló’s works.
The artists were interested in the photographic archive of the work in the documentation center, from the photographic documentation of the practices of Abelló will have the opportunity to apply the algorithm of artificial intelligence in the production of new works of visual art. The data collected will be used to train artificial intelligence models. The resulting work will take place in the months following the residency and it is planned to present it in 2022-23, taking advantage of the centenary of the birth of Joan Abelló.
During the research residency, they carried out the pre-production and research phase of the artistic project. The project aims to investigate the idea of the journey, a journey that is seen through the images of others. The pandemic has taken us back in time and reminded us how difficult it was to travel in the past and how people traveled with the imagination of the images to distant places.
Joan Abelló’s work has a very important relationship with the many journeys that the artist made during his life and which he reflected in his extensive pictorial work. The work generated by Varvara i el Mar will use artificial intelligence trained with the pictorial work of Joan Abelló to generate imaginary journeys that emerge from the spaces of Abelló’s painting. It is a work inspired by the work of the painter that will allow you to see it from a new point of view. Formal work will be an installation or a video.
Varvara and Mar have collaborated on previous occasions with the Abelló Museum, in December 2017 they presented the exhibition Camaleon, with the aim of communicating the issue of national identity, belonging and tolerance in cosmopolitan times and, at the same time, the rise of extreme and polarized nationalisms.