Feria de Malaga (The Malaga Fair) 2010 will be opened on the  La Malagueta beach of on Friday August 13 at 23:50, by singer Javier Ojeda.  Everyone will gather at the beaches to hear the Pregón de la Feria, the official speech that starts the festivities. The opening ceremony will be followed by  a fireworks display, the lighting of the Paseo del Parque and the beach concert of Miguel Boséof  at 24:00. For nine days the city of Málaga will be dedicated to the Feria de Málaga. Basically it is all about music and dance.

Throughout the duration of the fair there will be tons to do ALL day. No matter how old you are or what music you are interested in, there is something for everybody and there you won’t be getting much sleep. Everything starts at 9 every day and as one of the golden rules of the feria there is no time to end the party at night.

On the second day of the fair the city center is transformed with horses carrying people dressed in typical Andalucian costumes. The horses and horse-drawn carriages take Malagenians to the church (Santuario de Ntra. Sra. De La Victoria), where they attend a service and offer flowers to the patron saint of Málaga, the Virgen de la Victoria. This is a chance to see a beautiful display of horse-riding clothes and outfits, horse harnessing and the special andalusian costumes and dresses.

For more details, vide and photographs see TVSpain - FERIA DE MALAGA, Horses.

During the day the fair takes place in the Malaga’s Old Town “Feria de Día” and in the evening in the outskirts at The Palacia de Feria located south-west of the center “Real De La Feria” (the feria proper). Feria Real is a rather commercial theme park and mass entertainment. In contrast the fair in the city center is a wonderful an spontaneous gathering of thousands of people joining together to have fun.

For more details, video and photographs see TVSpain - FERIA DE MALAGA, Madness.

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The spanish film director Julio Medem premiered his new movie Room in Rome (Habitacion en Roma) during the 13th Spanish Film Festival 2010 in Malaga - see trailer on TVSpain . This is his eight film and first made entirely in English. It tells the story of Alba (Elena Anaya) and i Natasha (Nathasa Yarovenko), which unfolds over twelve hours, through the night and into the early morning, before each woman departs, Alba to Spain, and Natasha to Russia.

The room seems always to have been waiting for them. It’s ancient walls exude a magical atmosphere, heavy with sensuality and ripe with endless erotic possibilities. As Alba and Natasha enter into the unknown, intense new feelings are awakened, and a natural understanding between them grows, giving rise to comic as well as powerfully intimate moments, before the unexpected arrival of love pierces them.

At first they hide, cautious, protecting themselves. Slowly they allow themselves to be borne away, each into the unknown terrain of the other, yet never abandoning the honest love felt for their respective partners - in Alba’s case, a mother of two, in Natasha’s, the man she is due to marry in one week.

Until at last both find themselves transfixed before a completely new truth, a shared abyss, a secret kept in a hotel room in Rome.  A true freedom to do whatever they most fervently desire.

You can also watch interviews with Elena Anaya, Julio Medem and Natasha Yarovenko made by TVSpain

Click the images to enlarge:

The Center of Contemporary Art in Malaga (CAC Malaga) presents Gilbert & George’s first major exhibition in Spain after a ten-year absence. Jack Freak Pictures, the duo’s most extensive and ambitious series to date, will travel to six European countries, starting with CAC Malaga between 5 February – 9 May 2010 and finish in Gdansk at Laznia Centre  for Contemporary Art - November 2011 – February 2012 . Race, religion, sexuality and criticism of the British establishment are the core themes that this new exhibition explores, whilst the dominant elements are the red, white and blue, the colours of the Union Jack. Parallel to the exhibition, the film The World of Gilbert & George, written and directed by the artists themselves, who also star in it, is shown in Space 5, together with a documentary entitled Tim Marlow with Gilbert & George. The exhibition is supported by the British Council.

Click here to watch Gilbert & George video on TVSpain

Although they are often described as Pop artists, the truth is that their work is difficult to label. They have used a wide range of techniques over the years as they have gradually built up their body of work, which can well be described as a compendium of the politically incorrect: from painted faces and singing sculptures to a completely digitized system in which only the final piece takes physical form. This is a characteristic grid or panelled system in which the artists themselves are always represented. Moreover, their works bear clear, direct, striking titles that reflect both the artists’ concerns and their rebellious spirit (Jesus Jack, 2008 - see below).

The tour dates are as follow:

• Centro de Arte Contemporáneo (CAC) Málaga, Spain
5 February – 9 May 2010
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, Croatia
 June – September 2010
• Palais des Beaux Arts (Bozar), Brussels, Belgium
 October 2010 – January 2011
• Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany
 February – May 2011
• Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria
 June – October 2011
• Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, Poland 
November 2011 – February 2012

Diana Navarro returned to Malaga (where she was born in 1978) to present her new album ‘ Camino Verde ‘ in Teatro Cervantes on 23rd March 2009. She was applauded by a huge audience and many people had to stay outside as they didn’t get the tickets.  You can watch the TVSpain video, which contains some highlights of the concert, get more information about Diana Navarro and download photographs on TVSpain - DIANA NAVARRO, Camino Verde.

She opened the concert with the album’s title song ‘Camino Verde’, and than greeted the audience with a short emotional speech: ‘It’s a great pleasure for me to come back to my city with the new album, which is the project of my life. Since I started to sing Coplas and took part in competitions, I always dreamt of having my own show in this magnificent theater. It is very emotional to come hire, I love my city, I adore it and I always hold it in my hart’.

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Related video:

DIANA NAVARRO, 24 Rosas concert, New Wave Flamenco, Malaga

Diana Navarro concert of songs from her new album 24 Rosas at Teatro Cervantes in Malaga, Spain on 24th February 2008, recorded by TVSpain.
Diana Navarro was born in Malaga, a town in the province of Andalucia, in Spain, which is the birthplace of flamenco. But it turns out that Navarro doesn’t really sing flamenco — or not just flamenco. She’s part of a new generation of artists who are transforming Spain’s most traditional music. Navarro’s approach falls more into a style called copla. …. more

The 17 sculptures by Manolo Valdes, Spanish painter and sculptor are exhibited on the Calle Larios in Malaga until 29th March, as a part of the program Art in the Street. Manolo Valdes, born 1942, is a Spanish artist residing in New York, working in paint, sculpture, and mixed media. He introduced to Spain a form of expression that combined political and social obligations with humor and irony. See TVSpain video: Manolo Valdes  sculptures in Malaga, photographs and more information about the exhibition.

The show starts off with ‘Lilie’, a large head of a woman. ‘Irene I’, ‘Irene II’ and ‘Odalisca’ are the other sculptures created specially for the same exhibition in Barcelona last year. The theme is repeated: a woman’s oval face is the protagonist. The improvised gallery goes up, It passes women with hairdos, the enormous, “Lady of Elche” with oval eyes, gigantic hands and a metallic curved hairdo. The sculptures show the voluptuousness of the maids of honor to the enormous heads without faces formed by rotund square blocks, from metallic black to oxide. The same street that one year ago welcomed the sculptures of Rodin, now, shows the works of art made by Valdes that is the aim of the tourist’s cameras and the surprise of pedestrians.

Valdés is a reputable Spanish artist who received various awards, including the Lissone and Biella in Milan in 1965; the silver medal in the second International Prints Biennial in Tokyo; an award from the Bridgestone Art Museum in Lisbon; the Alfons Roig Award in Valencia; the National Award for the Fine Arts in Spain; a medal from the biennial International Festival of the Plastic Arts in Baghdad; and in 1993 the Medal of the Order of Andrés Bello in Venezuela.

Related video:

RODIN MALAGA, Sculptures at Calle Larios, Malaga he work of the world-famous French sculptor, Auguste Rodin, is gracing the most famous street in Malaga, Calle Marques de Larios, where the seven bronze sculptures remains under 24 hour guard …. (more)

Rirkrit Tiravanija, the Thai artist and a teacher at Columbia University in New York, has created a site-specific installation ‘A long march’ for the Malaga Contemporary Arts Center (CAC Malaga) comprising 6,000 t-shirts placed in the middle of the centre, which are free to people who go to see the exhibition.
To take away a t-shirt for free, visitors simply have to agree to have their photograph taken in the style of a mug shot - front view and side view, whilst holding a card with the visitor number on it. The slogan printed on the t-shirt: “Uno no puede simular la libertad” (you can’t feign freedom) is meant to encourage people to reflect on what it means to be free. The photographs will be sent to the University of Malaga where students will use them to create another exhibition.

As the pile of t-shirts goes down, a film showing an Oriental boy eating rice can be seen on the wall behind. According to the director of the art centre, Fernando Francés, this is conceptual art at its finest. The images projected in the film are said to represent hope and positivity, as the boy is a “symbol of the future” says Francés. The idea for this participative exhibition came after the artist attended a demonstration in East Germany some years ago.

Rirkrit Tiravanija ‘A long march’ installation at CAC Malaga is opened between 06.02.09 / 29.03.09 , free admission.  For more details see CAC Malaga website and the video page at TVSpain.

‘Under the Snow’, an exhibition of Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, two Russian conceptual artists of the international reputation who were forced to leave the Soviet Union to live in New York, is made up of twenty-three large format paintings, twenty five watercolors and pencil drawings shown first time in Spain.

The artists use the snow like metaphor of the memory, which both reveals and hides the traces of the former Soviet Union. ‘ Bringing together history, landscaping and and abstraction, they use a palette in which the gentleness of the colors provides a strong contrast with the figurative fragments that reflect reality and where white symbolizes the lack of perspectives in society’ - CAC Malaga.

Ilya y Emilia Kabakov ‘Under the Snow’ is opened between 27-02-09 / 21-05-09, free admission. For more details see CAC Malaga website and video page at TVSpain.