C-32 Sucursal
La Ene en MALBA
August 8–October 13, 2014
MALBA
Ave. Figueroa Alcorta 3415
Buenos Aires
Argentina
Hours: Thursday–Monday noon–8pm,
Wednesday noon–9pm
T +54 11 4808 6500
prensa [at] malba.org.ar
www.malba.org.ar
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MALBA, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, is pleased to present C-32 Sucursal. La Ene en MALBA, the latest edition of the Contemporáneo program dedicated to current art from the country and the region. This exhibition features La Ene, Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, a Buenos Aires-based project geared to institutional criticism founded in 2010.
The exhibition is conceived as a temporary relocation of La Ene’s activities to MALBA, occupying the gallery1, as well as the museum’s façade and part of the central hall. La Ene’s collection, which consists of 16 pieces, and its archive is on display. A series of workshops, interventions, and residency programs organized jointly by MALBA and La Ene will take place. The show is curated by La Ene: Gala Berger, Sofía Dourron, Marina Reyes Franco, and Santiago Villanueva.
“La Ene’s collection took shape in response to the constant difficulties that museums face in relation to their collections, problems regarding issues like storage and conservation,“ explains Marina Reyes Franco, one of the founders of La Ene and its current director. The museum set out to work around these obstacles and to find alternatives to traditional notions of the permanent collection and of institutional holdings.
The collection revolves around works that can be stored on a hard drive and activated anywhere. “This does not mean that the collection consists solely of digital works, but rather that it focuses on works that can be adjusted to digital format for conservation,” the curators explain.
In the framework of the exhibition, Sofía Olascoaga from Mexico and Radamés “Juni” Figueroa from Puerto Rico have developed projects as curator and artist-in-residence, respectively. During the residency, Olascoaga furthered her research for a project titled “Entre utopía y desencanto” (Between Utopia and Disillusionment) that deals with alternative education in Cuernavaca, Mexico, exploring aspects relevant to Argentina. More specifically, her intention was to share the process that her research on the historical experiences in Cuernavaca from 1950 to 1990, has addressed, experiences that gave rise to reflections, practices, and models for community life and social action that encompass psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives as well as perspectives relevant to alternative education and social movements.
In keeping with his recent projects for the Whitney Biennial and SculptureCenter in New York, Figueroa made an inhabitable sculpture and site-specific intervention for MALBA’s central hall stairways. Conceived to encourage audience participation, this structure constitutes a platform and a meeting point, as well as a space of reflection, within the context of the exhibition. The sculpture makes use of vernacular Puerto Rican tropical architecture as well as formal references to the Paraná River piers. It forms part of Figueroa’s longstanding research on the tropical and life in the Caribbean.
Luis Camnitzer presents his work-text El museo es una escuela (The Museum is a School) (2011–), a site-specific installation for museum facades that changes with each location. First exhibited in Buenos Aires at La Ene in 2013, Camnitzer’s installation will be on loan to MALBA during the exhibition. The work’s complete text reads: “The museum is a school: the artist learns to communicate, the public learns to make connections.” As part of this action, MALBA has produced a postcard with a photograph of the museum’s intervened façade.
In conjunction with the exhibition, MALBA will publish a bilingual Spanish-English catalogue with texts by the curators and Pablo León de la Barra, as well as complete information about each of the works in La Ene’s collection, its archive, activities and the residencies at MALBA.
