Exhibition: «Waving» by Marta Van Tartwijk at URIBITARTE40

Waving is the latest artistic project of the Catalan artist Marta van Tartwijk, resident at BilbaoArte in 2019 and 2023, and designed especially for the BilbaoArte Foundation municipal URIBITARTE40 Hall. The exhibition is based on her work during her residency; it features a series of items straddling drawing, audiovisual, sound and sculpture.  

The exhibition title plays with the nonexistence of a term in both Spanish or Basque that captures the double meaning contained in the English word.  “Waving” is the gerund of “wave” in the sense of moving to and fro like a “wave”, a mass of water curling and advancing towards the shore, the propagation of a fluctuation in space.  Yet “to wave” is also the action of moving your hand as a greeting.  This word forges together a continuous repetitive movement in the landscape and in the body, thus generating a coherence between both.  

This game of mirrors and repetitions between milieu and body act as the overarching thread running through the artist’s different works in the room:  I-II-III-IIII and Hand Movie, two sculpture installations produced by the artist during her BilbaoArte residency in 2023; Es la imagen de un rio [It is the Image of the River],  produced specifically for the large windows of the exhibition hall and using aluminum sheets embossed with drawings made using photographs of the vegetation along the Bilbao river estuary, which were taken by the artist on her walks  there in the last year; and the Waving installation,  the focal point of the project consisting of two audiovisual projections and a sound installation that combine and confront the performance action that documents the movement of four bodies  (Jara Roset, Katixa Goldarazena Azpirotz, Blanca Niemietz, and Marta van Tartwijk); a second video of plants recorded in the dark where the bodies move against the plant landscape that randomly vibrates in the wind and creates plant prints; and an installation with loudspeakers and microphones that generate live sound. 

The exhibition is constructed as a type of container architecture where a single liquid is poured and which takes on different shapes, depths and opacities.  Thus, the works interrelate in the same way as tributaries of a same river, constructing together a landscape that unites concerns regarding representation, language, materiality and gestures.