The annex to the Palacio Valeriola houses part of Hortensia Herrero’s multimedia art collection, with works by artists such as teamLab, Michal Rovner, Olafur Eliasson and Julian Opie.
teamLab (a collective founded in 2001). The World of Irreversible Change. This is an interactive piece showing a city that is somewhere in time and yet also here and now. The world of the work is connected to the outside world of Valencia, so it has the same conditions in terms of the weather and the season of the year. By touching the screen, visitors can pit the people against each other. This work evolves through interactions; through them, an all-out war could be unleashed that would raze the whole city to the ground and reduce it to ashes. If this happened, there would be no way for it to return to its original state; vegetation would take possession of the ruins and gradually grow over time. The fact is that there are actions in life from which there is no turning back – hence the title of the work.
Michal Rovner (born Tel Aviv, 1957). Silent Waters. This piece is part of a series of works in which Rovner portrays crowds of people, wandering aimlessly across her LCD screens. In the artist’s own words: ‘I don’t want to tell a story. I’m looking for something underneath the story. It’s very important for me to start with reality. I work with video when my work could have easily been done with animation, as I strip all the people and places of any characteristics. You can’t really tell if it is a man or a woman, for example. I like to mix videos I’ve taken of people from different times into one work. This also applies to the locations I use, as I often mix together several completely different places. […] The figures I use could be me; they could be you. But what they do have to have is a sense of reality. The figures have to be real people.’
Olafur Eliasson (born Copenhagen, 1967). Your Accountability of Presence (2021). Light, colour, perception, viewer participation … all these are constant features of Olafur Eliasson’s work, as we can perceive in this installation, in which visitors see their silhouettes projected onto the wall in a wide range of colours, creating a whole optical play in which movement plays a crucial part.
Julian Opie (London, 1958). Sam Amelia Jeremy Teresa 2. Julian Opie draws his inspiration from his immediate surroundings, such as the people he passes in the streets of London. His work uses new technologies, but is inspired by the most ancient art. As the artist himself explains: ‘I first noticed people as possible things to draw when standing at railway stations and seeing rows of people on the opposite platform. Seen flattened out and from a distance I could imagine a way to draw them. I see echoes of this flattening out of people into lists or friezes in ancient Assyrian stone panels and Egyptian tomb paintings.’
