Exhibition

The works from the ARCO Foundation Collection allow us to trace out an itinerary through the art from the decade of the 1960's to nowadays, this time with a focus on two ideas that have also been an important part of the exhibition programming of the CA2M in recent years. On the one hand, the very notion of art, and its potential to generate meaning through minimal gestures. The other theme that plays a role in this presentation is personal and collective memory, as well as our capacity to reread our past in order to understand the present and imagine the future.

Can art be a shared and fun experience? Sacrilege is a work by British artist Jeremy Deller, a full-scale replica of the Stonehenge megalithic monument, reproduced as an "inflatable castle", which the audience is invited to jump on. This is one of the largest inflatable structures in the world, with a surface of over one thousand square meters. The work is a reflection on the monument, which, ever since its creation 4000 years ago, has had a public use as a work of art, reformulated over and over throughout History.

More than ever before, today images - no longer only photographic, but those produced digitally, as well as video - are erected and deploy all their power as a kind of machines of self-production, where subjectivity and objectivity cross paths. Therefore, this is about photography, and about all the techniques (digital photography, slides, installations) which exceed it, put to work to produce nothing else but a kind of vanishing point outlook on the world.

During the process of over a year of collaborative work, Werker magazine has set in motion, through workshops, a variety of methodologies of self-representation, as well as different processes of generation of images of work with associations and collectives from Móstoles. The exhibition pretends to be a space which can contain diverse processes developed by Werker in Móstoles, but where new self-representation and reflection strategies based on the image can also be activated.

Fernando Sánchez Castillo’s work casts a critical gaze over history, both ancient and recent, while at once examining art’s role in depicting and shaping our view of it. As part of this quest, the exhibition recreates the living room in the artist’s home: a place dotted with dozens of preliminary forms for sculptures, impromptu or meditated reflections, that have been with him throughout his life and which could direct our gaze towards some of his future projects. The same room also includes some new output.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.