PRESS RELEASE July 27, 2010 Avelino Sala to present two books on his work in LABoral Centro de Arte on Thursday, July 29 The event will take place in the Mediatheque of El Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. The Asturian artist Avelino Sala will present two books on his work this Friday, July 29, in the Mediatheque of LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. The event will take place at six in the afternoon and Rosina Gómez-Baeza, Director of LABoral, and the centre's chief curator, Benjamin Weil, will both be in attendance. Dossier Avelino Sala documents the work El enemigo está dentro, a sitespecific installation that the artist made specifically for the central patio of Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura in 2008. It includes photographs of the work and texts written by the artist and the art critics Fernando Castro Flores, José Luis Corazón Ardura and José Manuel Cuesta Abad. The title comes from an episode from the civil war during the seige of a city. The event was employed by the artist not only to establish a patent dialogue with the architecture that housed the installation but it also gives a new reading of the state of today's culture. The other book, La Voz remota, is a dialogue between art critic José Luis Corazón Ardura and Avelino Sala, published at the completion of the project with the same name. According to Fernando Castro Flores, who wrote the book's introduction, this dialogue, "which is unscripted but highly coherent, shows that a conversation can be a piece of art. This book is the realisation of a kind of textual sculpture." Avelino Sala is probably one of the most prolific Asturian artists. His work - always cutting-edge - has been featured in many different competitions and exhibitions. At the beginning of his career, his work was inspired by immediate reality - almost autobiographical - where he appeared as the protagonist, his body covered in digital tattoos, recreating his passions. This was the case with La espera, where he took on the theme of surfing, or the project Ícaro, where his literally empty characters visit the loading bay by the docks, abandoned industrial complexes, or the famous carbon industry so closely associated with Asturias. Without abandoning drawing (a discipline he has always nurtured), sculpture in its most varied forms, photography and video have become increasingly more important in his work - video itself rising to the level of protagonist. In his latest work, Avelino Sala has started taking positions on polemical subjects, entering into social and political debate, such as is the case with the installation Disparad sobre nosotros. 1 LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Los Prados, 121. 33394 Gijón - Asturias. T. +34 985 185 577. F. +34 985 337 355 [email protected]. www.laboralcentrodearte.org