Colection XV: Oriol Vilanova

CURATED BY VÍCTOR DE LAS HERAS

Although it may well be the least known part of its holdings, CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo possesses a large number of graphic work. In fact, after photography, it accounts for the second biggest portion of the collection. That being said, it has much less visibility in terms of exhibitions, despite the fact that it includes prints and graphic works signed by some of the seminal names in contemporary art.

With the purpose of considering different approaches to the art centre’s collection, CA2M invited the artist Oriol Vilanova to engage with its holdings of graphic work. Vilanova is an artist whose practice is grounded in a conceptual strategy that rethinks issues pertaining to collecting, its order and ways of exhibiting. By means of a working methodology focused on compiling and documenting images, he proposes the archive as the deconstruction of a single narrative of the past, viewing the conventional museum as an exhibition space in disuse, and involving its reconsideration as a necessary place from which to rethink orthodox practices and narratives.  

Initially trained as an architect, Oriol Vilanova has come up with various interventions that overturn our way of conceiving an exhibition of a museum’s collection. The first consists of a cabinet-like architecture which holds all CA2M’s graphic work in the smallest space possible to be shown, a kind of epic cabinet of curiosities. The second intervention, taking an approach at odds with the first, is presented as an installation which compiles empty display cases from various museums in Madrid which, by means of absence, speak of themselves.

Oriol Vilanova (Manresa, 1980) lives and works in Brussels. His favourite laboratories for research are flea markets, thanks to which he has put together a collection of old postcards which he uses as a “thinking machine” and the conceptual groundbase for his plays, installations and performances.