Exhibition Archive
To celebrate International Museum Day, CA2M has come up with a new way of activating its collection and making it more widely accessible.
“ASSOCIATED MAKING. ASSEMBLY KIT OF PIECES FROM THE CA2M COLLECTION” is a curatorial programme by Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo that views the exhibition as an open, imaginative and surprising reflection in which artists, institutions and audiences can collectively rethink our contemporaneity.
There is a signature feature to Hannah Collins’s photos of urban horizons: the sky is always tinted with a strange colour. Like the images over the credits of an imaginary film, this photo captures the feeling that a particular place—whether through premeditated cultural references or a subjective impression—produced in the artist at a certain point in time.
The background on which this exhibition is literally outlined is the work De entre las muertas [From the Dead] (2020) by the artist Diana Larrea, who has traced the margins of History of Art to restore forgotten genealogies of women artists from the Renaissance up to the beginning of the 20th century. These women artists are joined by other ones from younger generations enabling us to think in the present tense.
In museums like ours, experience appeals to the whole body, with its distinctive features, its desires and different possibilities. Performance is the way contemporary art refers to artistic productions that place the body, its articulation of presence and the temporality of its actions, at the heart of its proposal.
The pieces in this exhibition, from the CA2M and Fundación ARCO collections, enable us to trace the history of the use of textiles in contemporary art from the 70s to the present day.
La exposición de Charlotte Moth, comisariada por Caroline Hancock, forma parte de las invitaciones que el CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo hace regularmente a artistas para que trabajen sobre sus colecciones. La artista ha trabajado en un proceso asociativo que responde a la materialidad del edificio y de su espacio expositivo centrado en tres de las obras de las colecciones y en sus posibles interconexiones: dos partes de un fondo de escena pintado por Leonor Fini en los años 50 encargado por Antonio el Bailarín, el gouache Sin título de 1989 de Sol LeWitt y la serie Deutsche Museen [Museos alemanes], investigación fotográfica sobre los museos de arte contemporáneo en Alemania realizada por Elmgreen & Dragset en 2005.
Y tú, ¿por qué eres negro? (And you, why are you black?) is an open, personal and collective archive of the construction of Blackness as a political force in Spain which can be approached in many ways. It is a dispositif to construct a history of our own but also an educational tool aimed at racialised audiences and an instrument of empowerment placing Afro- at the centre.
On view in the museum lobby, The Pudic Relation Between Machine and Plant, 2016, a piece by the New York based Portuguese artist Pedro Neves Marques (Lisbon, 1984), consists of a video made with the King’s College Centre for Robotics Research in which a sensitive plant, a Mimosa Pudica, reacts in contact with a robotic arm, closing every time the cyborg limb touches it.
Since museums first came into existence back in the eighteenth century, there has been a tradition of exhibiting that consists in showing sculptures in central courtyards and lobbies, allowing various fragments from the history of art to coexist in the same space, as part of a stage setting designed to be viewed by a comparative gaze.