Existencias
21 September, 2007-January 8th, 2008
MUSAC
Museo de Arte Contemporáneo
de Castilla y León
Avenida de los Reyes Leoneses, 24
24008 León
(T) +34 987 09 00 00
(F) +34 987 09 11 11
www.musac.org.es
MUSAC PRESENTS EXISTENCIAS, A MAJOR EXHIBITION INCLUDING HUNDREDS OF WORKS HELD IN THE MUSEUM COLLECTION
Existencias/ Project overview
On 21 September MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León, is to present Existencias, its third major project drawn from the MUSAC Collection after Emergencias, the museum’s opening exhibition that began on 1 April, 2005 and Fusion, Aspects of Asian Culture in the MUSAC Collection, that took place between December, 2005 and April, 2006. The show will take over the museum’s entire exhibition space (5 halls, Laboratorio 987 and the Showcase Project: over 4,000 sq m in total), introducing the work of over 200 Spanish and international artists held in the MUSAC Collection. Existencias does not follow a specific theme. On the contrary, it goes with the flow of art collecting’s inherent tendency towards accumulation and selection. Through this cumulative presentation, reminiscent of the Baroque salons and cabinets, the intention is, on the one hand, to underline certain concepts inherent to generating an institutional collection (accumulation, a diversity and blending of disciplines), and on the other to reappraise our ways of seeing as determined by this cumulative use of space.
The MUSAC’s architectural space will be treated as a warehouse, where the works will be displayed in a way that is different from the usual manner in contemporary museography. We have resorted to the idea of the Baroque cabinet that defined the great salons until the early 20th century and was recovered to a certain extent by some avant-garde movements, in order to display works without the element of “blank space”, today so broadly accepted as the only possible context for reading a work of art. At the same time, by pre-empting any possibility of a dogmatic or linear reading of the exhibition, the aim of the exhibition is to leave the viewer entirely free to find his or her own path and approach to experiencing an exhibition such as this.
The artists
Though the viewing experience is suggested as an immersion into a multifarious galaxy, there will be a core spatial progression defined by certain works that speak for themselves on the issues we intend to raise. The course sets out from Montserrat Soto’s installation Paisaje secreto (Secret Landscape). Doors leading onto different private collections are a first step into our own. Likewise, Alicia Martín’s wall of exploding books, Contemporáneos, draws our attention to a universe where accumulation will be the guiding thread, leading into an oversized cabinet crammed with works, not unlike Candida Höfer’s vision of a hall at the Louvre, or the vast landscape of paintings created by Perejaume. We are facing the cumulative excess of Western history itself. Beyond this point, a massive cabinet nearly 80 m long will display an array of the Collection’s paintings and photographs in different media and on different themes. In parallel to this space, Julian Rosefeldts piece Asylum will be shown as a metaphor of a diverse world governed by work where unity cannot be. Other installations and sculptures by Marina Abramovic, William Kentridge, Christian Jankowski, Tobias Rehberger, Hussein Chalayan and Paul Pfeiffer, amongst others, will lead the way to MUSAC’s main hall, which will be hung with most of the collection’s two-dimensional work shown in previous exhibitions. Here we will see the deposit in deposit. The path will continue through works revolving around light and direct experience of it, with pieces by Daniel Canogar, Jennifer Steinkamp, Atom Egoyan, Juliao Sarmento and Charles Sandison. Finally, a large hall with works by Wolfgang Tillmans, MP & MP Rosado, Maximo Vitali, Francesc Ruiz and Barry McGee, all loaded with an excess of visual noise, will complete the course, which will however be left open through its extensions in the Showcase, displaying a selection of drawings, and Laboratorio 987, with Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s work Zidane: A 21st century portrait.
Volume II: The Publication
In line with the exhibition, the museum will publish Volume II; a progress report on the collection since 2005. The book covers a number of works by a total of 122 artists, focusing on those that have been shown in the museum’s exhibitions to date. The book will also include essays and the works’ cataloguing details.
