Tere RecarensMy work is like a long journey,enriching every project with the encountersI make along the way.

Tere Recarens is an interdisciplinary artist from Arbúcies and lives in Berlin. As an artist she works everywhere and especially with people outside the art scene. She is curious about her surroundings and the society. Her work is like a long journey from one place to another, enriching every project with the encounters she makes along the way. She is walking hand in hand along the roads of Bamako, Bar-celona, Paris, Berlin and Tehran. Tere is traveling through time and geographies, disproving cultural boundaries and erasing the ones that have been raised between life and art.

Kultur Karma, sound instalation, 2008Exhibition view Arte e investigación, Montehermoso Kulturunea, Victoria, ES

Bamanas minority are born with a tere, the official language of Mali. I decide to go there to see the country for myself. I was corresponding with Salia Male, ethnologist of the Musée national du Mali.

Maa tere manalen, video 12’23’’, 2008Exhibition Karma Allumé, Galerie Toni Tàpies, Barcelona, ES

During this time, I became fascinated by local textile designs and their manifold uses as transmitters of messages: political, healthcare or social messages. In my second project I designed a pattern, whose motifs were related to the concept of tere, and produced a fabric in collaboration with Malian weavers.

We cut the fabric up into equal-sized pieces and we give them out to residents of the capital city, Bamako, and they make clothes with it, in exchange for taking part in a video I want to make.

Maa tere manalen, West African fabrics, 2009Exhibition view Maa tere Manalen, Frac Bourgogne, Dijon, FR

I swap new pieces of fabric for old ones.

Whether a virtue, a flaw or simply involuntary, the idea of tere illustrates the fact that, amongst the Bamanan, the individual lives in an environment of cons-tant insecurity. And knowing that an individual’s destiny and, indirectly, his community’s, is dependent on his tere, and that all of the tere, the good and the bad ones, are invisible, we appeal to certain sages, especially to the elders, but we also seek psychics (flèlikèla), miracle workers (soma) or witchdoctors (mori) to identify each tere through divination. These people are also endowed with a gift: they can influence the tere’s impact on the acts that individuals perform on a daily basis.-Salia Malé

Exhibition view VERNACULARITY, Alternativa, Gdanz, PL, 2015

Hier wäre das Leben leicht, Art Laboratory Berlin, Berlin, 2008

Maa tere manalen, 20 Cushions 86 x 106 cm, 32 of 50 x 74 cm, 2009

Project Room, Galerie Toni Tàpies, Arco, Madrid, 2009Maa tere Manalen/El riu segueix el seu curs, Bólit-Sant Nicolau Centre d’Art, Girona, 2011Artisima, Galeria Anne Barrault, Torino, 2014

FAIRE L’AVENTURE, 2009-2015Three fabric sails 2,80 x 4,30 m, 1,90 x 4,70 m, 3,70 x 3,20 m, Video 3’05’’

SOS, Signale, 48 Stunden Neukölln, Neukölln Arcaden, Berlin, 2015Printemps de Septembre, LA09 Espace Saint Cyprien, Toulouse, 2009Costa Brava. Segle XXI. Caixa Catalunya. Fontana d’Or, Girone (cat.), 2009

We made some sails with a group of people living in Mali. The video describe five aspects of migration.

Printemps de Septembre, LA09 – Espace Saint Cyprien, Toulouse, 2009SOS, Signale, 48 Stunden Neukölln, Neukölln Arcaden, Berlin, 2015Hors les murs, FIAC, Jardin des Tuileries, 2018

Drawings with descriptions of different concepts of clarivoyants, 2016SATT, 48 Stunden NeuKölln, Kirschsaal der ev. Brüdergemeine, Berlin

ECOUTER MALÍ, 2016Nine banners with sentences of intellectuels and inhabitants of Malí, painted with the bogolan tecknique: earth on top of cottonfabric.

Agenc y of living organisms, TABAKALERA, Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea, San Sebastian, 2016

The river follows its course, 2009-10Video 12’30 m, fotos, texts and two banners of 270 x 435 cm and 550 x 340 cm

Accompanied by a horse called ‘Amigo’ and a wagon with a cover that served as a banner, Özay Sahin, filmmaker, and I organised two trekking trips with visual artists, photographers, musicians, writers and hunters from the area, from Turkey, and from all over Europe.

Together, we travelled along the Pülümur and Munzur rivers, and protes-ted against the hydroelectric power stations that Turkey is threatening to build in this Kurdish region that is home to the Alevis.

Exhibitions:A Dilemma: Contemporary Art and Investment in Uncertainty, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, 2013El riu segueix el seu curs _ Maa tere manalen, Bòlit-Sant Nicolau, Girona, 2011Le fleuve suit son cours, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, 2011PROTEST, Kunstverein Tiergarten/Galerie Nord, Berlin

19 MARÇ 201419 Març 2014, Arts Santa Mònica, Barcelona, 200419 Març 2014, Black box. White cube, CA2M – Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Móstoles, Madrid, 2014

Tere Optimiste , 2016

Exhibition view, Art3, Valence, Fr, 2016

Matèria Primera, Fabra i Coats, Centre d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2017

Baharestan carpet, 2017

Cardboard inspired by The Winter Carpet or The Spring of Khosro, wich disappeared and it is only known about through descriptions. This carpet was in the palace Taghe_Kasra (Arc of Kosroes) in Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia at the time of the Sassanian Empire. At the Arabs invasion, in 637, they took it and bring it to Umar Califat, the carpet were so big and heavy that he decided to cut it into several pieces and distri-buted it as loot. The carpet is divided into four main areas, as the traditionals one’s Chaharbarg, the themes on this one are: Simourgh as a mitologie, Shirin and Farhad at the time of the King Kosroes, Mohammad Mossadegh as a democratic politic and Golan, the actuallity of women in our days.

D’ici à Ici, Hans & Fritz contemporary, Barcelona, 2017Baharestan Farsh, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, 2018Paradeiolie, Salon international du dessin contemporain, Marseille, 2018

Tere in Tehran, 2018

I landed in Tehran with my ‘Baharestan Carpet’ and suddenly l were at *Kooshk. l felt like a Greek scholar, a mathematician who discove-red specific weight or density. There is a story behind his discovery. The empire of Greece had a jeweller who made a crown of pure gold. Later when the empire received his crown, he doubted the jeweller had used the pure gold. Perhaps it was mixed with gold. He asked Archimedes to solve the problem of whether the crown was made of pure gold or not. One day, when Archimedes went into the pool to take a bath, he found that some of the water poured out of the pool. He found there was a direct relationship between the volume of the displaced water and the weight of his body. He shouted I find it, l find it. This way he had discovered the rule of density.

*Kooshk, palace at the garden and also the name of the artist residency

Farsi, 2018

Tere in Teheran is very surprised that in Farsi there are five words to say merci: Dastet dard nakoneh, Merci, Mamnoon, Motesha-kkeram and Sepas. These will be written in Farsi on a dusty mirror.

Kooshk open studio and Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris

BESENREIN (Immaculate Clean), 2003Video 1’35”

Video taken from the sky, I am sweeping the clouds.

Exhibitions:Fresc, Galeria Toni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2011Video(S)torias, Sala Norte, ARTIUM, Vitoria-Gasteiz, 2011Cosas que solo un artista puede hacer, MARCO, Musée d’art contemporain, Vigo, 2010CIGE 2009, Casa Asia and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Pékin, 2009El viaje dislocado, MARCO, Musée d’art contemporain, Vigo, 200716 Artistas en transito, Cercanias RENFE , Madrid, Barcelone, Bilbao, Valencia, 2006VideoViaje, III Encuentro Bienal. Arte Lanzarote 2005, El Almacén, Arrecife,2005Parker’s Box, Loop’04, Barcelone , 2004Video-Zone2, Second International Video Art Biennal, Tel Aviv, 2004Sur la bonne pente, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris, 2004Summer Shorts (Fear of Flying), Parker’s Box, New York, 2004Videoshop, La Pinta, Saragosse, 2004Looking Further, Thinking Through, Reykjavik Art Museum, Reykjavík, 2004Finger Flip, Parkers Box, New York, 2003

ETHEREAL, 1999

J’ai construit une chambre qui se balançait quand on y pénétrait car elle ne touchait pas le sol. À l’intérieur, une vidéo montrait des singes portant des drapeaux sur lesquels il y avait écrit « Hal », le nom de la salle d’exposition.

WET PAINT/TERE SPAIN, 1998-99

On the New York subway they put signs saying “WET PAINT” on everything that has just been painted. I changed the phrase on those signs for another one: “TERE SPAIN”. As on the original sign, I wrote down a reference number next to the warning, I put my phone number.About 13 people called me, including the police. Although my English was awful I made one good friend, Harly. I abandoned the project when the last guest came with a gun and ripped a painting in the Museum.

TERE RECARENS

TERREMOTO, 1994-2009

J’ai construit un sol instable avec des grosses planches en bois. Dessus, j’ai posé des étagères et toutes sortes de meubles sur lesquels j’ai placé des objets fragiles. Tout tremblait sous les pas des visiteurs. Certains d’entre eux avaient peur de faire tomber les objets que j’avais mis sur les meubles et les étagères, tandis que d’autres étaient tout joyeux de pouvoir profiter d’une liberté aussi inattendue

Exhibition view Terremoto, Capella de l’Antic Hospital, Barcelone, 1996Franchement, Galerie de l’École et Friche Belle de Mai, Marseille, 1994Magma, Goldraush Program, Berlin 2006Charles Kaisin. Design in motion. Grand-Hornu, Hornu, 2009PUNK. Sus rastros en el arte contemporáneo, MACBA, Barcelona, 2016

J’Ai REUSSI (Lo conseguí), 1996Photografie

I managed to run down the stairs in 15 seconds, the time set on my automatic camera self-timer.

Exhibitions: Diaporama 04, Primavera fotogràfica, Barcelona, 2004Narracions, Galeria dels Àngels, Barcelone, 1996Rencontres nº 8, La Vigie Art Contemporain, Nîmes, 1996