Art has always gone beyond aesthetics and the work itself, whether linked to cave spirituality, architectural shelter - and the representation of power - or criticism of the world we live in. The Macba not only does not avoid it, but in the first mutation of the permanent exhibition under the direction of Elvira Dyangani Ose, Macba Collection. prelude Poetic intention, insists on it with the incorporation of 21 new works, among which there are several recent pieces.
Thus, for example, you can see Valor refugi II, by Teresa Estapé, which, based on a series of blank sheets – one of which hides an 18-carat gold sheet – hanging on the wall criticizes commodification of the art. On the sheets is written without ink "show me the money", the slogan popularized in the film Jerry Maguire.
The Orden público facility is also critical. Vagos, maleantes y peligrosidad social, by Daniel Gasol, which draws from the research surrounding the vagos y maleantes law that was promulgated in 1933, during the Republic, and which was not repealed until 1995. The different pieces that exhibited there include a mural with various sentences due to the law, such as a case in which a woman, accused of prostitution, did not answer the questions of the interrogators, who insisted without hesitation. Days later, doctors diagnosed that the woman could not answer because she was deaf and dumb: she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. It also includes the screening of the video No se os puede dejar solos, with seven interviews with people who would currently fall within the legal profile of the vagos y maleantes law. All of this to denounce the legal will to gag and exclude especially the poor, as Gasol explains in the book of the same name that collects part of his research, published by the Chiquita Room gallery, where the work was exhibited.
You can also see two works by Max de Esteban under the title A forest (A forest) around the infrastructure of artificial intelligence: on the one hand, a series of photographs in which he shows the result of programming a deep learning platform specialized in facial recognition to offer portraits of itself, a first AI selfie, which is not anthropomorphic but rhizomatic. On the other hand, there is a video based on interviews with fifteen of the world's main investors in AI: "I'm interested in explaining how the oligarchies that control the infrastructures think, what political and personal motivations are behind it, in a kind of of ethnology of the global elites, and the truth is that it's scary", explained the artist yesterday.
Or Carlos Bunga's installation Animisme, made expressly for the exhibition and which explores everyday life from various household objects in a kind of "expanded painting", objects that according to the artist have a soul and invite you to think that they are not just what they seem because "we live in a world in which the idea of home is changing".
Works by Marcel Broodthaers, Joan Brossa, Fito Conesa, Helen Escobedo, Marine Hugonnier, Elena del Rivero, Joaquim Chancho, Tres, Domènec, Anne-Lise Coste, Ahlam Shibli, Joan Morey, Lucía C. Pino or the installation about our relationship with the sun, House of the Sun, by Pedro Torres, in addition to the progress of Luz Broto's piece Una pared, a wall that will cross the building and modify its circulation to rethink the museum when it is finished in 2024.
When the new exhibition of the Macba's permanent collection was inaugurated half a year ago, Dyangani already spoke of his intention for the exhibition to be dynamic and changing, and yesterday the first of these variations of an exhibition that continues with the will to break the institutional framework to offer a space for reflection and criticism. For Dyangani - curator with Antònia M. Perelló, Claudia Segura and Patricia Sorroche -, "it is crucial that the works are at the center of the artistic experience" to "confront ideas with poetics, with the museum as the axis of modernity ”, a great opportunity for him to enter into dialogue with the artists.
"Whenever I've had to ask myself crucial questions in life, I've found answers in works of art," said Dyangani. Rethinking the world through art.
