89 KM. Colección CGAC
File
The exhibition 89 Km. Colección CGAC includes a selection of works from the Collection of the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, curated by Virginia Torrente. A total of 85 pieces by 63 artists, in a variety of media — paintings, drawings, photographs, videos, installations, sculptures, models, etc. —, many of which are new to the public at large, that will travel to Vigo on account of this event in what is a first-time collaboration project between the two institutions
INFORMATION AND VISITS
Members of the museum staff are available in the halls to provide visitors with information, in addition to the regular guided tours:
• Every day at 6 pm
• ‘A la carte’ tours for groups, by appointment at the tel. 986 113 900
Summary
In 2008, the exhibition Private passions, public visions was the first approach made by MARCO towards the past and the present of private art collecting in Galicia. Following along this line, and focusing on this occasion on institutional collecting, the exhibition 89 Km. Colección CGAC presents, for the first time in Vigo, a selection of what is undoubtedly the most important contemporary art collection in Galicia: the collection of the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea.
In addition to its own collection, the CGAC also houses the Fundación ARCO collection, on consignment at the Galician centre. Both collections have been subject to a fresh interpretation by independent curator Virginia Torrente, who has chosen a number of works mostly hitherto unknown by the viewing public, thus offering one of the many and possible views of the collection. The exhibition title, “89 Km.”, refers to the distance between the cities of Santiago and Vigo, which for three months will become the distance travelled by the pieces.
The CGAC Collection is currently made up of over one thousand works, representative of artists in different contexts and highly diverse in terms of languages and media. This exhibition offers a closer look at the collection and thus of the history of the CGAC and institutional art collecting in Galicia, with pieces that reflect the most significant moments of the artistic scene.
The showing of the works in the MARCO exhibition rooms has been structured by theme, by way of a six chapter narrative, according to the layout of the ground floor:
1. Interpretations of day to day reality
Baudrillard stated that the subversive role of images is to disclose the literality of objects. Several artists invite us to participate in a narrative of free interpretation, by means of media as formal and as varied as sculpture, photography and video, offering us their own personal takes on reality and the private and daily universes of each and every one.
Mona Hatoum, Wolfgang Tillmans, Iván Navarro, Lars Arrhenius.
2. The message and other meanings
The predominance of mass media as used by economists, politicians and advertisers is subject to analysis in a different section of the exhibition, either by accumulation, ironic interpretations on the real message, or by turning it into surrealist manifestations. Information, compilation, appropriation, reinterpretation, are just a few of the elements of this section.
Thomas Hirschhorn, Thomas Locher, Ken Lum, Gabriel Kuri, Eugenio Dittborn, Ignasi Aballí, Jac Leirner, Rivane Neuenschwander, Jordi Mitjá, Rubén Grilo, Fran Meana, José Damasceno.
3. Questioning convention
Small touches of humour are needed in daily life to break up routine, monotony, sadness and tragedy. Through giggles or subtle irony, peals of laughter or satire, we attempt to interpret the pieces in this section of the exhibition. Using daily domestic and/or public scenarios, the works of the artists included herein depict situations that question the conventional.
David Bestué & Marc Vives, Erwin Wurm, Mladen Stilinovi_, Hans Hemmert, Mauro Cerqueira, Anna Bella Geiger, Roman Signer, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Jonathan Hernández, Jonathan Monk, Yann Sérandour, Suso Fandiño, June Bum Park.
4. The essence of the artist, his drawing
An artist’s personal language becomes more intimate when drawing, thanks to the immediacy of the medium and its symbolic capacity for transmitting the action from mind to hand in one single stroke. Of an autobiographical nature in many of the works shown here, drawing is a personal or external diary for the artist and a reflection of what is happening within and around this means of expression. Some works go beyond actual drawing and embrace other media such as sculpture and collage or expand even further into the realms of animation video.
Fernando Bryce, Tonico Lemos Auad, Efrain Almeida, Pauline Fondevila, Martí Anson, Raimond Chaves & Gilda Mantilla, Allen Ruppersberg, Gabriel de la Mora, Francis Alÿs, Ana Jotta, Adrian Piper, Azucena Vieites, Teresa Moro, Arturo Herrera.
5. The global village map. We live in the city
The stress of the modern world is best represented by the city. Post-colonialism, the welfare state, territory and border, growth and ruin, the centre and the outskirts, are some of the themes presented by artists in this section. Habitability and urban development have a very fragile relationship, also explored by the artists observing the landscape of the 21st century: the metropolis. Analyses of the city range from the ironic to the sublime, from the descriptive to the personal, all the way to condemnation of social inequality and poverty generated by development.
Botto & Bruno, Lara Almarcegui, Rui Toscano, Melanie Smith, Bülent _angar, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Daniel Lara, Alexander Apóstol, Ângela Ferreira.
6. The museum. Spatial exercises
For quite a while now sculpture and painting have broken away from their traditional moulds to merge into less academic hybrid forms. The deletion of borders has increased the importance of the space wherein pieces are shown and which are often created on site for a specific location. Place, size and representation are conceived as spatial exercises that, displayed within the museum, can lead us to explore and question the very theoretical basis of such an institution, to reflect on artistic creation and its mutability, or give way to more open spatial practice.
Elmgreen & Dragset, Diego Santomé, Liam Gillick, Amaya González Reyes, Txomin Badiola, Salvador Cidrás, Álvaro Negro, Ceal Floyer.
Artists
Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958), Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972), Efrain Almeida (Ceará, Brasil, 1964), Francis Alÿs (Amberes, Bélgica, 1959), Martí Anson (Mataró, Barcelona, 1967), Alexander Apóstol (Barquisimeto, Venezuela, 1969), Lars Arrhenius (Estocolmo, Suecia, 1966), Txomin Badiola (Bilbao, 1957), David Bestué y Marc Vives (Barcelona, 1980 / Barcelona, 1978), Vicente Blanco (Cee, A Coruña, 1974), Botto & Bruno (Turín, Italia, 1963 / Turín, Italia, 1966), Fernando Bryce (Lima, Perú, 1965), Leda Catunda (São Paulo, Brasil, 1961), Mauro Cerqueira (Guimarães, Portugal, 1982), Raimond Chaves & Gilda Mantilla Bogotá, Colombia, 1963 / Lima, Perú, 1967), Salvador Cidrás (Vigo, 1968), José Damasceno (Río de Janeiro, Brasil, 1968), Denmark (Amberes, Bélgica, 1950), Eugenio Dittborn (Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1943), Elmgreen & Dragset (Copenhague, Dinamarca, 1961 / Trondheim, Noruega, 1969), Suso Fandiño (Santiago de Compostela, 1971), Ângela Ferreira (Maputo, Mozambique, 1958), Ceal Floyer (Karachi, Pakistán, 1968), Pauline Fondevila (Le Havre, Francia, 1972), Anna Bella Geiger (Río de Janeiro, Brasil, 1933), Liam Gillick (Buckinghamshire, Reino Unido, 1964), Amaya González Reyes (Sanxenxo, Pontevedra, 1979), Rubén Grilo (Lugo, 1981), Mona Hatoum (Beirut, Líbano, 1957), Hans Hemmert (Hollstadt, Alemania, 1960), Jonathan Hernández Ciudad de México, México, 1972), Arturo Herrera (Caracas, Venezuela, 1959), Thomas Hirschhorn (Berna, Suiza, 1957), Ana Jotta (Lisboa, Portugal, 1946), Gabriel Kuri (Ciudad de México, México, 1970) , Daniel Lara (Monterrey, México, 1976), Jac Leirner (São Paulo, Brasil, 1961), Tonico Lemos Auad (Belém do Pára, Brasil, 1968), Thomas Locher (Munderkingen, Alemania, 1956), Ken Lum (Vancouver, Canadá, 1956), Fran Meana (Avilés, Asturias, 1982), Jordi Mitjà (Figueres, Girona, 1970), Jonathan Monk (Leicester, Reino Unido, 1969), Gabriel de la Mora (Colima, México 1968), Teresa Moro (Madrid, 1970), Zwelethu Mthethwa (Durban, Sudáfrica, 1960), Iván Navarro (Santiago de Chile, Chile, 1972) , Álvaro Negro (Lalín, Pontevedra, 1973), Rivane Neuenschwander (Belo Horizonte, Brasil, 1967), June Bum Park (Seúl, Corea del Sur, 1976), Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa (San Sebastián, 1963), Adrian Piper (Harlem, Nueva York, EEUU, 1948), Allen Ruppersberg (Cleveland, Ohio, EEUU, 1944) , Bülent Şangar (Eski_ehir, Turquía, 1965), Diego Santomé (Vigo, Pontevedra, 1966), Yann Sérandour (Vannes, Francia, 1974), Roman Signer (Appenzell, Suiza, 1938), Melanie Smith (Poole, Reino Unido, 1965), Mladen Stilinović (Belgrado, Serbia, 1947), Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, Alemania, 1968), Rui Toscano (Lisboa, Portugal, 1970), Azucena Vieites (Hernani, Guipúzcoa, 1967), Erwin Wurm (Bruck an der Mur, Austria, 1954).
Curatorial text
“As an independent curator I have been given the opportunity to tell a story in several chapters; a story about Galician, Spanish and international artists and pieces created on many different media. The idea is to create a new context for the CGAC collection, which has travelled 89 kilometres to be presented in Vigo for the very first time.
Beginning with the belief that the works that form part of a collection must be shown, an curator may choose to follow his or her instinct, enthusiasm and various criteria with regard to the artists’ works in a collection. The various relationships between artists and works gives rise to new interpretations that enrich the collection; approaches that will follow different concerns. An curator’s primary instinct when putting together an exhibition may lead him or her to select works of artists of personal interest to the curator, an irrational and visceral choice. But such enthusiasm must be contained in order to create a context that is intelligible to the spectator, a mid-point between passion and form. The realm within which the curator moves when working with an already defined collection can generate different sensations, ranging from the incongruent to the poetic, linking temporal regions, remodelling what is already there, whilst questioning and reclassifying the works into new circuits.
Some works thus attract others, one artist attracts another, and the whole is defined in the various exhibition rooms bringing to the forefront questions that make up a map, like pieces of a puzzle that must be fitted together to be interpreted; like small fragments of a message that must be put in order. The spectator then finds himself before works that generate an empathy that stretches beyond their physical presence, that lead him to question how and why a certain work was created by an artist, what it is doing here now, how has it become part this exhibit. A work is questioned starting from its condition as an object through to the role it plays in the museum’s didactic programme. This enables the work of art to continue to fulfil its role: to create doubt, either generated by its ambiguity or its clarity, but always with regard to the observer. The aura of the piece acquires greater power or is dissolved within a given context.
Among commitment and escape, among more formal or freer uses of artistic media, at MARCO we find groups that have endeavoured to avoid two formulae: the articulation of historical chronology and the relevance of an artist’s name. Given such premises, we have attempted to sketch a varied landscape, subdivided into various narratives of multiple interpretations offered by the works of the artists in this exhibition. The medium chosen is also extremely important in the 21st century despite its many versions and hybridisations. Disciplines and genres, materials and mutations, make up this plural narrative”.
Virginia Torrente
[Exhibition Curator]
