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.
On Monday 18 May we will be celebrating International Museum Day, with this year’s theme of “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”. Despite the fact that our doors are still closed, we will celebrate the importance of institutions like ours throughout the whole week on our social media.
We will begin by defending the essential role played by all the people who have continued working in the museum throughout the confinement: security and cleaning staff, who ensure that it is maintained in optimum conditions for the day when we are able to return. For many years now, we have been refocusing our collections so that the acquisitions we make respond to criteria of equality, for instance enhancing exhibitions by women artists who still do not enjoy the institutional recognition they deserve. Besides our commitment with gender inclusivity, we are also working to ensure the visibility and representation of all forms of life, expanding the LGTBIQ perspective in our programming and collection, but also introducing intersectional criteria that includes raciality: it is fundamental to focus on issues of racism and our own institutional role in its networks of exclusion, a task that is still a long way from being completed.
Here at CA2M, many unexpected situations take place in the encounter between visitors and the material culture preserved here. The exhibition halls are a place where we can meet strangers, but there is also a peculiar physical encounter between objects and people. We believe that life in the museum, to be completely inclusive, has to be aware that it is a space of coexistence, a place where the aesthetic experience enables us to recover the magical dimension of things and species.
In May 2007, the Mexican artist Damián Ortega installed Obelisco transportable in Doris C. Freedman Plaza in New York. This obelisk on wheels is a biting comment on the displacement of the centres in big cities and the stability of symbols of power in the city space. Today this obelisk is in Móstoles, lying prostrate in our storeroom. It could be raised to its feet (or wheels) any given day here in our own halls or could travel to some other place, to mark the spot of a new centre. The screens of our smartphones or laptops become our portable exhibition halls, places of power where discourses and reflections are directed, affecting our emotions and consciences or helping us to imagine a new representation of the world. The radical experience of the body’s relationship with everything else will still have to wait another few weeks, when we open our doors once again and brush the cobwebs off the exhibition on absurd humour in Spain. But this museum, CA2M, will continue latent like a sleeping portable obelisk.
Happy International Museum Day!
Entre el 11 y el 18 de mayo celebramos el Día Internacional de los Museos a través de nuestras redes sociales, síguenos para no perderte nada.
On Monday 18 May we will be celebrating International Museum Day, with this year’s theme of “Museums for Equality: Diversity and Inclusion”. Despite the fact that our doors are still closed, we will celebrate the importance of institutions like ours throughout the whole week on our social media.
Damián Ortega, Obelisco transportable (2007). Fotografía de Seon Kuong
Our Collection is growing every year thanks to acquisitions from art galleries, artists and heirs, as well as through donations. The Department of Culture and Tourism of the Autonomous Community of Madrid has a Commission for the Assessment of Art Acquisitions that usually meets twice a year to decide on any acquisition and donation offers that have been presented.
The world’s museum community has celebrated the International Museum Day on 18 May every year since 1977. This year’s theme is Hyperconnected Museums: New Approaches, New Publics.
We shall talk about pieces from our collection which we will see in different contexts: the storerooms they are kept in and in the exhibition galleries. The visits will be led by the artists Patricia Esquivias (morning) and Antonio Ballester-Moreno (evening), Olga García Caro and the museum’s education and conservation team who will all contribute their personal perspectives on the works.
Maximum of 20 people per group.
Máximo 20 personas por grupo.
The world’s museum community has celebrated the International Museum Day on 18 May every year since 1977. This year’s theme is Hyperconnected Museums: New Approaches, New Publics.
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.
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.
Desde 1977 el 18 de mayo se ha designado como Día Internacional de los Museos (DIM) para concienciar al público sobre el papel de estos en el desarrollo de la sociedad. Bajo la consigna de este año elegida por el ICOM: Los museos como ejes culturales: El futuro de la tradición, este día se centrará en los nuevos papeles que desempeñan los museos como actores activos en sus comunidades, reconvertidos en ejes culturales que funcionan como plataformas donde la creatividad se combina con el conocimiento y donde los visitantes pueden crear, compartir e interactuar. A medida que se desarrollan como centros culturales, encuentran nuevas formas de honrar sus colecciones, historias y legados, creando tradiciones que tendrán nuevos significados para las generaciones futuras y una nueva relevancia para un público contemporáneo y global cada vez más diverso.
El CA2M realizará la tradicional visita guiada a sus almacenes a la vez que propone un diálogo entre las mujeres de su entorno, —las participantes en el colectivo Tejiendo Móstoles, cuyos trabajos están orientados por un compromiso solidario—, y las obras de las mujeres artistas premiadas este año en ARCO 2019, que utilizan el textil como soporte artístico para visibilizar importantes cuestiones actuales. Es el caso de Mercedes Azpilicueta, que aborda la recuperación de mujeres artistas olvidadas y de su forma de hacer, y de Asunción Molinos, que pone sobre «el tapete» cuestiones ecológicas a partir de los cambios de la propiedad y la producción agrícola en una zona geográfica determinada extrapolable a otros muchos lugares, evidenciando la disputa entre los recursos naturales y los económicos.
Since 1977, 18 May has been designated International Museum Day to raise public awareness about the role museums play in society.
Asunción Molinos, Fragmento de Agricultura fantasma (cultivo limitado de recursos), 2018. Colección CA2M