Ángel Pantoja

At the heart of Le Centre Culturel Bonnefoy, Ángel Pantoja presents two collage works addressing human rights.

Gracesland
In 1985, a group of female artists, the Guerrilla Girls, protested outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met?” The world’s largest museums hold an overwhelming majority of works by men in their collections. The museum, as a cultural institution, has always been hegemonic and heteropatriarchal. Even the Prado Museum did not dedicate its first temporary exhibition to a woman until 2016, featuring the Flemish painter Clara Peeters. Based on painstaking research and a simple collage, the artist presents a manifesto for fairer representation and a history yet to be explored from a feminist perspective.

Human Rights
An inflatable raft is covered with the text of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With this image, Ángel Pantoja offers an allegory of the state of these fundamental principles from 1948: a floating lifeboat, constantly threatened with sinking by the waves of indifference, geopolitics, and authoritarianism. The legal and philosophical text, which should constitute the solid foundation upon which the societies of the United Nations rest, is here contained within an inflatable and unstable material. This poses a tragic paradox: the a priori validity of rights clashes with their a posteriori weakness in practice. The artist reminds us of this.