Opening on April 8th at 6pm at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Bird Dream Machine is the final chapter of a three-part project by artist Teresa Solar Abboud (b. 1985) that began with the presentations Machine Dream Bird at Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) and Bird Machine Dream at Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo presents Bird Dream Machine, the first solo exhibition by Teresa Solar Abboud in Italy. Based on a search for multiple concepts, the practice of Solar Abboud has evolved from early experimentation in video to explore form and material through sculpture, resulting in enormous installations that immerse the viewer in the artist’s narrative process. Her work reveals a profound interest in the relationship between matter, language, and bodily production, centered around the morphology of speech and the resistance of language. In recent years, Solar Abboud’s forms have increasingly drawn on elements related to the organic, leading to a world of metaphors related to bone structures, orifices, and the currents between them. Her installations have become correspondingly more complex, often encompassing architectural elements of the exhibition space to render the boundaries between the interior and exterior indistinguishable, and allowing architectural, geological, and animal dimensions to converge simultaneously.
Bird Dream Machine establishes a new reading of Teresa Solar Abboud’s work, focusing on the artist’s most recent production to present an environmental installation of her 2024 Tuneladora [Tunnel Boring Machine] sculptures. Appearing as hybrid, interconnected fragments of pieces of beaks and fins, the sculptures play on the duality between the rough, earthy clay of the bases and the sleek, smooth resin of the protruding shapes to evoke both the prehistoric beings that make up the subsoil and the machines that excavate them. Through this contrast, Solar Abboud not only points to differing material languages, affects, or even industries—such as the geological and mechanical—but also alludes to differing scales of time, from the primordial to the modern. As the artist describes, “These pieces are an attempt to inhabit the multiple times of Earth—its geological age and that of the compressed beings that compose it—as well as the time of humans, of their interference and knowledge tools.” Arranged one after another around a circular room, the repetition of these fragments creates a rhythm and movement that recalls the centrifugal force of a vortex. As if growing and unfolding, the circular installation seems to eschew the idea of linear progress to embody a multiplicity, suggesting an infinite horizon of possibilities.
The exhibition is the final chapter of a three-part project conceived in collaboration with Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) and Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA). Mutating across three venues, each iteration is presented as a different approach to the artist’s practice, beginning as “a space of contraction” with Machine Dream Bird at CA2M, expanding to become “a space of dilation” in Bird Dream Machine at MACBA, and culminating in compression in its final presentation at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Altogether, the exhibition takes shape as a triptych organ that generates a dialogue between the fictitious and the real, where different narrations in process propose new forms, materialities, and potentials.
Biografia
Teresa Solar Abboud (b. 1985, Madrid, Spain; lives and works in Madrid) was included in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Cecilia Alemani. Recent exhibitions of her work include Doblad mis amores, curated by Chus Martínez at Collegium in Arévalo (2023); Futuros Abundantes with the TBA21 collection curated by Daniela Zyman at C3A, Córdoba (2022); and Si las palabras hablaran, organized by the Young Curators Residency Programme, Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Madrid (2022). Abboud also participated in The Stomach and the Port, Liverpool Biennial, curated by Manuela Moscoso (2021); and La Fin de Babylone, KölnSkulptur #9, curated by Chus Martínez (2017). Solo presentations of her work include Time of Worms at Galeria Joan Pratz, Barcelona (2021); Big Mouth, within boundaries, oozing out, 1646, The Hague (2021); Formas de fuga, Travesía Cuatro Madrid (2020); Pumping Station, Travesía Cuatro, Ciudad de México (2019); Ride, Ride, Ride, Matadero, Madrid and Index Foundation, Stockholm (2018–19); and Flotation Line, Der TANK, Kunst Institute, Basel (2018). Her work has also been exhibited at the Future Generation Art Prize, Venice Biennale, Venice and Pinchuk Foundation, Kiev; Centro Conde Duque, Madrid; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid; Kunstverein, Munich; Haus der Kunst, Munich; Fundación Marcelino Botín, Santander; and Villa Croce Genova, MAXXI, Rome.
