Curator: Valentín Roma
Opening: Friday 15 June 7pm
Free guided tours: Tuesday at 6 pm, Saturday and Friday at noon
 

From his early days at TV Clot and BTV in the mid-1990s to his latest productions, such as his five-parter on punk in Spain, Kikol Grau (Barcelona, 1971) has developed a disquieting and irreverent imaginary that presents a kind of X-ray image of the history of television, politics and music from the 1980s to the present day, with a special emphasis on the alternative and independent audiovisual scene in Barcelona.

Dame pank y dime tonto is the first survey exhibition on the career of the audio-visual maker Kikol Grau (Barcelona, 1971). It spans the period from his early days at TV Clot and BTV in the mid-1990s to his latest productions and presents a kind of X-ray image of the political, television and musical history of Spain, with a special emphasis on the context of Barcelona from the 1980s to the present day.

The exhibition is divided into three sections. The first of these features a series of shorts such as Impenetreibol escroto (1992), K-fre! Desde Plutón con Amor! (1994-1995), The final fight IV (1998), Zool. Acto de purgar los caracoles (2000), and Docutrola: Cómo convertirse en un pirata de la televisión (2001-2002); various audio-visual montages that Grau made in his early days, among them Jason total massacre 1 / 2 (2008-2010), Las hostias de Bourne (2009) and El señor de los gramillos (2010); and lastly, a selection of experimental videoclips made for bands such as Tu Madre, Tarántula, Salvaje Montoya, Flamaradas, La Otra Gloria and Ktulu.

The second section covers his work for television, including iconic programmes such as Por la Kara TV (1994-1998), with Jorge Rodríguez, Pol Turrents and Juan Antonio Bayona; Gabinete de crisis, a weekly satirical show with Félix Pérez-Hita and Arturo Bastón, commissioned by Andrés Hispano, that ran from 2001 to 2007; Si te he visto no te aguanto TV, an internet television channel that broadcast independent and alternative programmes of cultural interest; programmes on music and film made for Metrópolis on TVE (2006-2012); K-POW! (2005), 13 short episodes on the world of comics made for the Denominació D’Origen series shown by broadcasters in the Network of Local Television Stations of Catalonia (2005); and 3 minutos para el fin del mundo (2017), a mini-programme commissioned by Joan Pons for the O Estudio Creativo website.

The third section looks at Grau’s filmography, from Objetivo Gadafi (2013) to his five-parter on punk in Spain, as well as Las más macabras de las vidas (2014), which explains Spain’s Transition to democracy, as illustrated by the band Eskorbuto, Inadaptados (2015), about Cicatriz, and No somos nada (2016), about La Polla Records. Magnicidios españoles y Poe (2017) and Moctezuma-Grau. Descendencia mortal (2017) are also included in the exhibition. In addition, the films Histeria de Catalunya, a collective piece, and Los demenciales chicos acelerados. Barcelona y alrededores are being screened for the first time at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge. Coinciding with Dame pank y dime tonto, the Filmin platform will be presenting an extensive selection of work that Grau has made over the course of his career.

One of the significant aspects for understanding Grau’s disturbing and irreverant imaginary is his drawings, which appear in posters, fanzines, scripts and preparatory notebooks and which constitute an episode in their own right in relation to his audio-visual projects. It is worth noting the importance in his iconographic universe of “the mad monkeys that are destroying Earth”, as he himself describes them.

The exhibition is complemented by a considerable body of material from Grau’s personal archive: posters, photographs, videotapes, vintage videogame machines, period record covers, comics that inspired him, etc.