42 Facts About Abel Azcona

Abel Azcona Marcos was born on 1 April 1988 and is a Spanish artist, specializing in performance art.

Abel Azcona is known as the "enfant terrible" of Spanish contemporary art.

Abel Azcona's work has been exhibited at the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka and Taipei, the Lyon Biennale, the Miami International Performance Festival and the Bangladesh Live Art Biennale.

Abel Azcona was born on 1 April 1988, as the result of an unwanted pregnancy, in the Montesa Clinic in Madrid, an institution that was run by a religious community.

Abel Azcona was then raised in the city of Pamplona with this man, who continuously went in and out of prison, and his family, which was unstructured and linked to drug trafficking and delinquency.

The first four years of Abel Azcona's life were characterised by mistreatment, abuse and abandonment, caused by different members within his family environment, and the fact he passed through various residences, which caused several concerns about custody from public institutions of social protection.

Abel Azcona coordinated a Catholic group in the Saint Vincent of Paul parish and was a volunteer with Caritas Internationalis.

Abel Azcona's first performances were created in the streets of Pamplona in 2005 when he was a student in the Pamplona School of Art.

Abel Azcona has been detained on various occasions for these.

Abel Azcona's adoption was characterised by complicated situations and a lack of attachment to the family, until he abandoned it definitively when he was eighteen.

Abel Azcona then returned to Madrid, living in poverty on the streets for almost two years.

Abel Azcona was inspired by his biological mother, a prostitute, and sought to empathise with her and with the moment of his own conception.

On this occasion, Abel Azcona offered his naked body, anesthetized by the use of narcotics, so that the visitors could use it freely.

Abel Azcona made a metaphorical critique by merging both walls in the work.

Abel Azcona formally invited by letter the organisations, groups, and entities that had threatened his life to the installation, where a loaded gun was offered and Abel Azcona stood exposed on a raised platform.

Over a period of several months in 2015, Abel Azcona attended Eucharists in churches and parishes that were linked to his own childhood.

Abel Azcona kept the consecrated hosts given to the attendees of the communion from the churches, gathering 242 hosts; this was the number of cases of pederasty reported in the north of Spain during the previous decade.

Abel Azcona documented all the situations of confrontation and included them in other exhibitions of the work.

Abel Azcona endured more than five years of judicial proceedings for various complaints about the work at different courts and judicial entities.

Two months later, Abel Azcona was invited to present his work in Mexico City in the Mexico City Museum, where he installed a sailcloth with the same sentence on it.

At each show, Abel Azcona gave a live performance, from a wooden swing, of the experiences of the survivors.

Abel Azcona began a series of works of a performative nature, which each criticise religious entities.

For Political Disorder, Abel Azcona joined many different institutions and political parties.

The piece, in which Abel Azcona joins all the Spanish political parties, is a critique of the system that prioritizes economic interest over true ideology.

Abel Azcona joined Falange Espanola, Vox, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party and the Popular Party.

Abel Azcona became a member of entities with a political connotation such as the extreme right-wing organization Hazte Oir, the Francisco Franco National Foundation, the Spanish Nazi organization Hogar Social and the "Christian Lawyers".

Abel Azcona invited dozens of relatives of Republicans who were shot, persecuted or disappeared during the Spanish Civil War.

In 2016, Abel Azcona coordinated a new performative action, or happening, with relatives of those who were shot in the Pozos de Caude.

Under the name of Desafectos, Abel Azcona formed a wall with the relatives as a complaint, next to the wells outside the city of Teruel, where more than a thousand people had been shot and thrown into the wells over the course of three days during the Civil War.

The performance was stopped after 42 days for health reasons, with Abel Azcona being subsequently hospitalised.

Abel Azcona created these works as a reflection and a discursive interruption of his own mental illness; themes of mental illness are often present in Abel Azcona's work.

Abel Azcona remained inside a garbage container strategically located in the center of the Biennale as a criticism of the artist's own gestation and the market of contemporary art itself.

Abel Azcona was unaware of the guests' origins and could not see them.

Abel Azcona's works push his body to the limit and are usually related to social issues.

Abel Azcona has been involved in several controversies and legal proceedings.

Similarly, people spoke in favour of ending the work where Abel Azcona stayed continually in a garbage container during the Lyon Biennale.

The exhibition was canceled and Abel Azcona had to return to Europe.

Abel Azcona's work denounces child abuse, and has been persecuted and criticised for being critical of the Church in works such as The Shadow and Amen or The Pederasty.

Whilst awaiting the case being heard by the Supreme Court, the Association of Christian Lawyers started a protest against Spain in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg for not condemning Abel Azcona, and, according to them, for protecting him.

Each time the work was shown, the complaint was re-formulated, so Abel Azcona was cited in the Court of Justice of Palma de Mallorca and in the High Court of Justice of Catalonia in Barcelona.

Abel Azcona defends his artistic ideology and his political ideas, which are supported by certain sectors of the Spanish left-wing.

Abel Azcona was criticized by Israel for the piece The Shame, where the artist installed fragments of the Berlin Wall along the West Bank Wall.