The Galloire Art Gallery in Dubai is hosting Loose Threads, the solo exhibition of Spanish installation artist Daniel Canogar. One will be able to attend it until February 24, 2023.
Although it is Canogar’s first solo show in the Arab region, he has already shown his artworks in the Middle East. His interactive audiovisual installation “Dynamo” in the Spain Pavilion was one of the highlights of Expo 2020 Dubai. In 2021, he presented “Bifurcation”, a building-sized laser projection, at Noor Riyadh, Saudi Arabia’s light and art festival.
Loose Threads explores the different fabrics and patterns which bind together informational threads: it presents the textile dimension of technology including cables, base plates, input ports, data flows, and ones and zeros. Canogar considers the UAE a perfect place to display his series of works which presents the present technological reality. “The Arab world has […] [a] deep tradition in fabrics and textiles, […] [they] represented and told the stories of culture, society, politics and economics. Combining that history with the backdrop of today’s Dubai, […] a city […] leading the way in so many aspects of the digital age, made it [such a] place […]“, the artist said.
Mobile devices have drastically changed our lives making us overstimulated and addicted to constant updates. Exposure to massive amounts of excessive and exaggerated information results in informational indigestion, which leads to a crisis of the perception of reality. In the exhibited works, Canogar captures this overwhelming amount of data and transforms it into a gesture that helps to process the scattered information we receive.
Among the artworks on display there is “In Ripple”: it comprises real-time images from CNN cascading down the screen, leaving behind a trail that covers and obscures previous news items. In “Billow”, the materiality of textiles is represented by curved LED screens that challenge the typical rectangular flat shape and provide a new corporeality to the technological device. “Chyron” displays updated news as a loose and restless fabric, while in “Abacus” stock tickers are used to create a mechanical composition.
Exploring different facets of contemporary life, Loose Threads help the viewers better understand some of the fundamental issues of our times.
About the artist
Daniel Canogar, a visual artist, was born 1964 in Madrid, Spain. In 1990, he got a MA degree from NYU at the International Center of Photography and soon became interested in the projected image and installation art. His multidisciplinary artistic practice includes not only photography and installation art, but also video.
He has created numerous permanent public art installations with LED screens, including “Brushstrokes” for the DeKa Bank headquarters’ lobby (Frankfurt, 2022); Currents a suspended artwork in the atrium of the renovated Evangelische Bank (Kassel, 2020); “Aqueous” at The Sobrato Organization (Mountain View, CA, 2019); and others. Canogar has also created public monumental artworks using various mediums: “Oculus”, a generative animation featured on Novartis Pavillon zero-media façade (Basel, Switzerland, 2022); “Fulgurations”, a project in collaboration with the Spanish National Cancer Research Center – CNIO (Madrid, 2021); and many others.
The artist’s solo shows include “Turbulencias” at Galería Max Estrella (Madrid, 2022); “Hidden Tides” at Wilde Gallery (Basel, 2021); “Reverberations” at Kornfeld Gallery (Berlin, 2021); “Billow” at bitforms gallery (New York, NY, 2020); “Liquid Memories” at Sala Kubo-Kutxa (San Sebastian, 2019); and many others.
His artworks has been exhibited in major museums and galleries all over the globe including Reina Sofia Contemporary Art Museum, Madrid; Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid; The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Galería Max Estrella, Madrid; bitforms gallery, New York; Wilde Gallery, Geneva; Galerie Anita Beckers, Frankfurt; and others.
More info about the Loose Threads exhibition on its official web page.
You might also be interested in visiting HyperSpace Aya in WAFI City mall in Oud Metha.
