CNIO Art 2024. Dora García, End (two prologues)
A project of:
CNIO Art is an initiative of the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO), with the support of Fundación Banco Santander, which brings together leading international scientists and artists to explore the common ground between art and scientific research.
The project is based on a fundamental principle: both science and art are creative activities essential to understanding the world. "There are no insurmountable walls between science and art," in the words of María A. Blasco, director of the CNIO. "Scientists and artists have always looked squarely at the unknown, at darkness, and we have not been afraid to enter it with an open mind in order to learn and to see further."
Every year the CNIO selects a major field of science with significance for humanity and invites a scientist of international standing in that area of research to establish a dialogue with a Spanish artist of national and international reputation. In previous years these artist and scientist pairings have respectively included Eva Lootz and Margarita Salas, Carmen Calvo and Juan Luis Arsuaga, Chema Madoz and Ignacio Cirac, Daniel Canogar and Sarah Teichmann, Susana Solano and Pedro Alonso, and Amparo Garrido and Elizabeth Blackburn.
For the CNIO Art 2024 edition, which has the theme of climate change and biodiversity loss, the artist Dora García, winner of the 2021 National Visual Arts Prize, has created the audiovisual work End (two prologues), based on her trip to the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic in the company of David Nogués-Bravo, a macro-ecologist, researcher and professor at the Globe Institute in Copenhagen. The film now arrives at the museum as an invited work and is presented until 21 October in Room 31 alongside the American landscapes from the permanent collection whose creators in the 19th century were already aware that the virgin North American natural world was in the process of disappearing.
“The Arctic is a place of grandiose landscapes, inhabited by countless species. It is a place that connects us with our origins, that fosters our communion with the whole and that surely holds the keys to that whole. A place where it is easy to understand, there is nothing untranslatable in it. Science confirms the loss of Arctic ice at a breakneck speed. The purity of the Arctic is threatened by human thoughtlessness and greed and the desire to exploit everything on this planet, including paradise” (María A. Blasco, director of the CNIO).
“End (two prologues) is the work commissioned from Dora García by the CNIO for its seventh edition. The artist has chosen one of her most recurrent mediums, film, but also writing and performance, all of them as devices that seek to position us as critical and aware spectators before that abyss of time established by sound and visual realities so far away—but strangely connected—in their political and poetic transmission” (Juan de Nieves, curator of CNIO Art).
