Visits

In April and May the curators of the Ester Partegàs and Dorothy Iannone exhibitions, Bea Espejo and Tania Pardo, will take you on a tour of the shows, pointing out the hallmarks of the artistic practices of these two creators.

MINOR ARCHITECTURE BY ESTER PARTEGÀS, curated by BEA ESPEJO

The world in our pocket

Having the world in our pocket is like inhabiting a minor architecture. It alludes to something small that leads to many things, highlights the value of what is within our reach, and celebrates the sensation of confidence we feel when we achieve a lot with very little. It also operates as metaphor for the condensation of the world: something immense, complex and infinite that can be concentrated in the palm of our hand. This thrill of understanding the world and seeing the inexhaustible in the everyday provide the premise for reflecting on Ester Partegàs’s work. 

• Tuesday 14 April, 6.30 pm
• Saturday 23 May, 12 pm

OVER AND OVER AGAIN BY DOROTHY IANNONE, curated by TANIA PARDO

Let’s talk about Dorothy...

The sixties, the Tarot, Dieter Roth, Sarah Pucci, Fluxus friends, Berlin, Düsseldorf and hundreds of recipes. Autobiography, love and the domestic realm were tools of exploration in Dorothy Iannone’s art. The intimacy and power of her works can also be interpreted as a space of women’s liberation, where the personal becomes political. In this tour, books, paintings, sculptures and sound boxes, saturated with text and colour, provide a gateway into Iannone’s universe and the central themes of her work: eroticism, sexuality and friendship.

• Saturday 18 April, 12 pm
• Saturday 23 May, 1 pm
• Saturday 13 June, 12 noon

Activity free of charge. Please register in advance by calling 91 276 02 21 or writing to ca2m@madrid.org 

These tours of the Ester Partegàs, Dorothy Iannone and Antonio Ballester Moreno exhibitions don’t seek categorical answers but open up a space where the experiences of visitors, and of groups that now form part of the museum, are put into play and create networks. We want to reflect together on it what means to tour an exhibition using conversation, listening and the difference of gazes.

How does what we see change when we focus on the fragment, the framing or the time we dedicate to a work?
What do we really use when we look at a work?

“What the eye doesn't reveal” proposes a tour where framing, fragment and time are mobilised to provide a deeper insight into Sky and Earth by Antonio Ballester Moreno, Minor Architecture by Ester Partegàs, and Over and Over Again by Dorothy Iannone. Three proposals which, each from a very different place, invite us to think about what falls outside the spotlight, about what is repeated and transformed, and about the intimate, the body and the everyday as territories of meaning.

A space to pause at the details and accept the partial gaze, allowing the works (and other people as well) to interrogate us, disturb us or connect us from unexpected places. A tour where the fragment is not something incomplete but a possibility; where the framing is not a limit but a revelation; and where time is measured not as duration but as intensity of the experience.

The tours will be accompanied by Francisca Soto Martínez (Santiago de Chile, 1989), artist, restorer and educator based in Spain. A member of the El Hueco collective, her work is situated at the intersection between collective memory, community building and cultural mediation, exploring the frictions between art, restoration and education.

Activity for the general public every Sunday at 12.30 pm

• Maximum capacity: 12 people
• Advance registration: 91 276 02 21 or ca2m@madrid.org
• You can also sign up directly at the Museum reception.

Group tours on Wednesday mornings

If you belong to a collective, association, educational establishment or informal group, contact us to arrange a tour by calling 91 276 02 27 or writing to educacion.ca2m@madrid.org

We invite you to join us for a guided tour entitled “Going round and round is what leaves a mark”, where we take a closer look at the exhibition Ria, by Jorge Satorre. In this activity, as we tour the exhibition we’ll reflect on the traces, repetitions and narratives derived from our own lives.

Can the simple act of strolling time and time again around an exhibition reveal connections between the themes of the works and our subjectivity? In “Going round and round is what leaves a mark”, we explore that possibility. As we stroll through Jorge Satorre’s artistic universe, we’ll try to discover the reflections, meanings and stories present in the works.

The tours will be led by Francisca Soto Martínez (Santiago de Chile,1989). Francisca is a Chilean artist, restorer and educator based in Spain. She is a member of El Hueco, a collective through which she develops projects on the themes of collective memory and community building. Exploring the frictions between art, restoration and education, she aims to create a positive impact on communities and non-hegemonic cultural heritage. Please register in advance by calling 91 276 02 21, sending email to ca2m@madrid.org or in person at the museum reception.

Maximum capacity: 12 people.

The Ha-ha is a deceptive mechanism that plays a role in the construction of the landscape. It generates an illusion of breadth and camouflages its real purpose: to control the movements of certain individuals or species. The name ‘ha-ha’ was used for the first time in the 1709 Dezallier d’Argenville book The Theory and Practice of Gardening, in which he explained that the name came from the exclamation of surprise from spectators when they recognised the optical illusion.

When I was asked to lead this tour, the first thing that came to mind was the title: Ha-ha Wall. It was almost an immediate association, perhaps induced by the huge contrast between this term and the immense work that presides over this show: 1,502 people facing the wall. It’s a laughable wall that is not remotely funny. It is a starting point, given that my and Santiago’s work have little in common at first glance. I have used the word ‘ha-ha’, which is a joke in itself, as a way of breaking the ice and beginning an unlikely dialogue between two generations, between two very different ways of approaching artistic production. Contrast again. And the contrast between light and shadow is what allows us to see… although not always. Shadows conceal or reveal, and looking directly at light can blind us. I want to approach this tour positioned from the paradoxes of looking, from the devices of visibility and concealment used to present facts, from the constant suspicion that in everything we are given to see, something remains hidden.

The CA2M Museum’s Education and Public Activities Department has a line of work aimed at developing thematic tours in which artists and creators are invited to discuss the exhibitions with spectators through the lens of their own practices. In this way, we avoid the presumed objectivity of the narratives that the exhibitions offer to instead break with hegemonic discourses. It is a space of inquiry which encourages each person to make their own interpretation of the image and the story in order to use them to generate new imaginaries.

Dates:

• Saturday 14 December 12 pm
• Sunday 15 December 6 pm

Ángela Cuadra inquires into images that discuss concealment techniques used throughout recent history in a broad phenomenological study of invisibility. Based on different sources with pre-existing historical and semantic meanings, she aims to find new layers of meaning in artistic expression. Grounded on collage and approached with intuition, her works are developed in multiple media, ranging installations to video, drawing and expanded painting.

She has held exhibitions at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Today Museum (Beijing), Centro del Carmen (Valencia), Sant Andreu Contemporani (Barcelona), Fundación Cultural de Providencia (Providencia, Chile) and Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) (Santiago de Compostela), among others. Since 2013, she has been working on the project space Salón, which she directs with her husband, Dai K S. She is also one of the founders of the first international fair of nonprofit spaces in Madrid, Supersimétrica.