To celebrate International Museum Day, CA2M has come up with a new way of activating its collection and making it more widely accessible.
“ASSOCIATED MAKING. ASSEMBLY KIT OF PIECES FROM THE CA2M COLLECTION” is a curatorial programme by Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo that views the exhibition as an open, imaginative and surprising reflection in which artists, institutions and audiences can collectively rethink our contemporaneity.
Mitsuo Miura arrived to Barcelona from Japan in 1966 with a suitcase in either hand and just a bare few words of Spanish. Armed with his oriental tempo, he sat down on a bench in Plaza de Cataluña to watch how this city by the sea passed by. Ever since, the young Japanese artist never stopped observing each and every one of the landscapes in which his personal life experiences have been played out. And so we could view his exhibitions as invitations to contemplation and displacement, almost always related with wellbeing, memory and pleasure.
Can moving arms, legs, hair be inspiring for a movement, a coming uprising for more joyful and equal ways of living together? Engaged with the precarious moment of taking the stage—a moment which allows for one’s visibility while at the same time disclosing one’s fragility—Portrait of a Movement addresses questions of pleasure, power, and radical difference. Two large film installations form the core of the exhibition: while engaging with dance movements and artistic collaborations, they explore abstraction’s potential for resistance in the face of reactionary politics.
There is a signature feature to Hannah Collins’s photos of urban horizons: the sky is always tinted with a strange colour. Like the images over the credits of an imaginary film, this photo captures the feeling that a particular place—whether through premeditated cultural references or a subjective impression—produced in the artist at a certain point in time.
Malicious Mischief is the result of exhaustive research into the artist’s life’s work with a view to expanding its narrative and recognition among European audiences, spanning from his early creations on the East coast to his work in the late-90s before he died from AIDS-related illness.
Myriad Reflector is an exhibition exercise into the nocturnality. Conceived as a multilayered score unfolding through time, the contributions of artists —composed by light, sonic, rhythmic, smell, haptic, and choreographic elements— intermingle in a kaleidoscopic display defined by disorientation, refractive perspectives, and sensual textures.
An Wei Lu Li has created a specific pictorial installation for the cafeteria at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Museum, with the sponsorship of Cervezas Alhambra
Al cuidado de las pequeñas sombras (In the care of the small shadows) is a site-specific installation created by Elena Alonso for the terrace of the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo Museum, consisting of four sculptures conceived as a bat shelter.
For the first time, more than 400 works by 250 artists are coming together in an exhibition that showcases the CA2M collections and takes up the entire museum space. It is a celebration of what the museum represents and has represented from the beginning. This journey begins with the historical avant-garde - all the artists who accompanied Picasso at the Pavilion of the Spanish Republic - and continues through history up to the present day. It is not only an international exhibition, as are all the CA2M and the ARCO Foundation collections, but also a story that is told from inside this institution, from the collections it holds, and ultimately, from Móstoles.
By supposing that logic makes chaos natural and order artificial, we are positing a physical and conceptual experiment of what an exhibition space is. Syntactic Tactic . Diego Bianchi is an exercise in disassembling. A white cube, a neutral space, windowless, consisting of white walls and a source of light shining from top to bottom, becomes the raw material for a plausible disassembling. Based on an absence of pre-defined moulds and behavioural guidelines, this project highlights a number of exhibition practices.