Otto Karvonen built nest boxes as part of his project, Alien Palace Birdhouse Collection, a series of birdhouses that he has gradually installed in various places all over Europe. His objective: to offer birds a safe and comfortable haven in which to raise their chicks, enjoying their presence. Two of his «palaces» are exhibited on the CA2M terrace, inspired by the Metsälä Centre, in Helsinki, and that of Aluche, in Madrid. His intervention has been meticulously considered, yet is voluntarily modest.
Cuatrocientos setenta y tres millones trescientos cincuenta y tres mil ochocientos noventa segundos was the title of the exhibition, as well as the precise amount of time that Los Torreznos had been working together at that point. In a certain way, it made it seem to us as though during during those fifteen years, Los Torreznos had created only a single piece of work, one that consisted of counting from 1 to 473,353,890, like they had started counting in February 1999 and had continued non-stop, day and night, in a fifteen-year-long performance.
The catalogue was designed to be a 'mediated artistic space' created through the written word and the absence of images, which represent the axis around which the work revolved. Designed by Susi Bilbao, it contains texts by some thirty authors, among which you can find Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego, Kurt Johannessen and Los Torreznos.
Teresa Margolles’ (Culiacán, Mexico, 1963) work shows her great interest in the way reality affects and directly determines the lives of individuals. Her pieces prove the impermanence of things, beings and relationship, and at the same time they suggest the urge and the need to develop specific solidarity actions. For CA2M, Margolles features a series of pieces resulting from a thorough and meticulous research process that she began years ago in Ciudad Juárez, North of Mexico.
It’s Possible Because It’s Possible brings together a series of pieces by Raqs Media Collective, a group of artists created in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi (1966), Monica Narula (1969) and Shuddhabrata Sengupta (1968). Located in New Dehli, Raqs Media Collective, is a thinking laboratory that uses the aesthetic as a starting point for social and political reflection. It’s Possible Because It’s Possible is an irrefutable statement against a defeatist determinism. This title becomes an appeal or a sort of manifest.
This exhibition, conceived as an event, will enhance performativity and the way it works, the way it performs itself. It will include objects, media as well as bodies. It will be “live” at all times, as installations, photography, films, performances, discussions, inhabit the space of the museum.
Orden Inconcluso (Unfinished Order) aimed at drawing a conceptual line between the different decades of Carlos Garaicoa’s work. Works that share economy and architec-ture understood as power, control and utopia have been carefully selected. Also, the exhibition offered the opportunity to see a few project-specific works that try to define and to dig into the artist’s intention to find a connection between the political and eco-nomic realities that he has experienced.
Since opening in 2008, CA2M has lent great emphasis to its collection with the purpose of conserving, studying and exhibiting it better and to bring it closer to the general public through an outreach programme specifically designed around it. To this end, CA2M regularly rotates its holdings in a series of exhibitions conceived to fashion new meanings, to forge new bonds and connections between the artworks and to envisage new ways of interpreting our surrounding world.
Applying the term ‘Boundary Objects’, the exhibition focused on the potential of objects to transcend established contexts and meanings: as opponents of their own history, the objects become mediators for larger contexts of a shared commemoration of the violence of unethical collecting, which filled the European museums of the 19th and early 20th century, and for the necessity of new creations of transcultural narrations.