Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa

Over the last years Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa (Donostia – San Sebastian, 1963) has been working with the subversion of discourses on power and obedience. His interventions sometimes consist of minimum changes introduced into more or less well-known sentences, such as when he removes the word ‘no’ from some of the Judaeo-Christian Ten Commandments. At other times, and in contrast, he makes a replacement. For instance, he hired a chamber choir to sing four popular Spanish and Basque songs but with lyrics taken from texts by French materialist philosophers. Thus, the original folkloric tracks are overlaid with issues pertaining to matter, the use of libidinal energy by the economy, praxis as the matrix of appearance and revolution. That said, far from subscribing to a ‘correct’ way of thinking, Pérez Agirregoikoa destabilizes all references, including the commonplace in which a quasi-universal consensus might possibly exist. To this end, on a large canvas we have a list of all the wars undertaken by the USA in the twentieth century, while on another he writes: ‘Capitalism is fabulous’. Instead of allegiance, what these operations look for is to undermine worldviews that are crystallized and, in consequence, foreclose any possibility of individual and social transformation.

Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa (Donostia-San Sebastián, 1963) lives and works in Paris. He studied Fine Arts at the UPV and at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Beaux-Arts de Paris and Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions of international relevance such as Maquinaciones ( Museo Reina Sofía, 2023), Where will we go from here?Twelve art stories told from Spain (Frankfurter Kunstverein, 2022), Active Threads (Kai 10, 2021), Memoria del porvenir (MUSAC, 2021), Vasos Comunicantes (MNCARS, 2021), MG+MSUM (2020), Jakarta Biennial (2015), How to (...) things that don't exist, 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014) and Lyon Biennial (2007).