2016 exhibition program

MALBA announces its schedule of exhibitions for 2016; exhibitions are listed by the month of their opening.


March
Jorge Macchi. Perspectiva (Perspective)
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gallery 5, level 2
This exhibition at MALBA is the first anthological exhibition of artist Jorge Macchi (Buenos Aires, 1963) ever held in Argentina; it encompasses some 25 years of production and includes videos, paintings, installations, sculptures, and works on paper produced since 1992. The exhibition is organized into four thematic blocks: (I) Temporality; (II) Maps, cities, and situationism; (III) Music, cuts, montages; and (IV) Pictorial phantasmagoria. While the title Perspectiva makes reference to a vision that looks back on the artist’s personal past and experiences from the present and encompasses his entire career, it also alludes to a constant in Macchi’s work: the tendency of the real to come undone. In his art, Macchi points out the fictitious nature of the signs that populate the world. As part of the project, the installation Refracción (Refraction, 2012), which has never been exhibited in Argentina, will be presented at the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and another art project at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

Claudia Andujar. Marcados (Marked)
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gallery 3, level 1
In March, MALBA will present Marcados by Brazilian artist Claudia Andujar (Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 1931), a series of over eighty black-and-white photographs. These images are a celebration of the rich Yanomami culture and a way into the complexities of its world. In the eighties, Andujar spent long periods with the Yanomami tribe in the basin of the Catrimani River in the state of Roraima, Brazil. As part of the health campaigns carried out at that time to help the indigenous population, Andujar took many photographs of the environment and its inhabitants. Along with the team of doctors, she identified each individual photographed with a number hanging around his or her neck that was used as an image in immunization records. Claudia Andujar. Marcados forms part of the series of MALBA projects that began in March 2015 that revisits the production of women artists who did not receive the recognition they were due at their historical moment, artists whose work deserves to be re-read.

Juan Tessi. Cameo
Curator: Lucrecia Palacios
Gallery 1, level -1
One and two exhibitions at once, Cameo is a project designed specifically for MALBA in which artist Juan Tessi (Lima, Peru, 1972) investigates the relationship that painting establishes with performance in the framework of systems for the regulation and distribution of images.  

April
Jeff Koons. Ballerina
Esplanade program
The esplanade of the museum is an important exhibition space intended either for large-format works conceived and produced specifically for the site or for major projects by important contemporary artists. In April, the work Ballerina (2015) by celebrated North American artist Jeff Koons (York, Pennsylvania, 1955) will be presented. This is the first large-scale sculpture by Koons to be presented in a public space in Argentina.

June
Yoko Ono. Dream Come True
Curators: Gunnar B. Kvaran and Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gallery 5, level 2 and other spaces in the city
This is the most significant show of artist Yoko Ono (Tokyo, 1933)—an essential figure in conceptual and participatory contemporary art—to be held in Argentina. The exhibition, conceived as Ono’s Instruction Pieces retrospective—a project in which the artist has been working on for over 50 years—includes over 80 works, among them objects, videos, films, installations, sound pieces, and recordings produced from the early sixties through the present. The “instructions” that Ono communicate to viewers in verbal or written form ask questions about the conceptual principles behind the work of art, highlighting its ephemerality while de-sanctifying the object, as well as enlisting the participation of spectators in its material realisation. The exhibition Dream Come True aims to reveal the basic elements that define Ono’s extensive and diverse artistic career—a voyage through the notion of art itself—with a strong social and political engagement. Through her works, Ono has created an array of relationships with viewers, inviting them to play an active role in her art’s creative process. Throughout the exhibition there will be special programming including an inaugural performance by the artist.

July
Voluspa Jarpa. En nuestra pequeña región de por acá (In our little region over here)
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gallery 1, level -1
This project at MALBA is the first exhibition of work by Voluspa Jarpa (Rancagua, Chile, 1971) ever held in Argentina. The individuals portrayed in the project—a gallery of portraits—are victims of murders or of unsolved crimes; they are public figures who had held administrative posts in the public sector or in civic organizations in the region. The show formulates a contrast between the two historical situations implicit in these biographies: the portraits (the stills) of the person versus the brutal register of violent deaths (the paintings). The layout of the exhibition gives shape to a kind of historical chronology and regional genealogy.

September
MALBA 15th anniversary: New exhibition of the permanent collection
Curators: Andrea Giunta and Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gallery 2, level 1
In September, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the museum, MALBA will present a new exhibition of its permanent collection featuring Latin American art on the basis of a different curatorial vision and architectural discourse. Andrea Giunta (member of the museum’s Scientific Artistic Committee and Director of the Centro de Arte Experimental at the Universidad Nacional de General San Martín (UNSAM)) and Agustín Pérez Rubio (Artistic Director at MALBA) will devise a far-reaching, plural, and diverse vision of the collection that focuses not only on historical works and “masterpieces” but also on pieces never before exhibited. The intention of the project is to forge a new vision of the collection and of the museum´s methodologies every two or three years in order to generate new discourses on the region’s art.

October
Alicia Penalba. Escultora (Female Sculptor)
Curator: Victoria Giraudo
Gallery 3, level 1 + Esplanade
This event is the first solo exhibition of artist Alicia Penalba (San Pedro, Buenos Aires, 1913–Landes, France, 1982) ever held in a museum in Argentina. It will include a selection of her abstract sculptures from different series (totemic, winged, monumental, and petits works) produced from the time she moved to Paris in 1948 until her unexpected death in 1982. Product of collaboration with the Alicia Penalba archive—which also contributed key information to the curatorial research—the show also includes sketches, photographs, letters, articles in the press, and sound and film materials on the artist’s thinking and production process: the raw material for a documentary produced by MALBA on the occasion of the show. MALBA will also present an approximately five-meter-tall totemic sculpture as part of the esplanade program.

Carlos Motta. No hay iglesia en la ciudad celestial (There Is No Church in the Celestial City)
Curator: Agustín Pérez Rubio
Gallery 1, level -1
In his works, Carlos Motta (Bogotá, Colombia, 1978) interrogates political and social history and proposes counter-narratives that recognize the voices of social groups, identities, and communities that have been silenced by the dominant power. For this exhibition at MALBA, Motta will present the project No hay Iglesia en la ciudad celestial, which examines the historical relationship between religion and sexual differences on the basis of an interest in the influence of Liberation Theology on different contexts in the region. The groundwork of the exhibition is the testimony of different theologians on the issue of sexual difference. Their testimony provides the conceptual framework for the series of videos, sculptures, drawings, and performances featured in the show. 

November
Antropofagia y modernidad. Arte brasileño en la Colección Fadel  
(Antropophagia and Modernity. Brazilian Art from the Fadel Collection)
Curator: Victoria Giraudo 
Gallery 5, level 2
The Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel Collection, based in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Brazilian art that includes over 3000 masterpieces. In this opportunity, MALBA will present an exhibition with some of the best quality pieces from the arrival of the avant-garde to the first conceptual developments in the ’60s. Curated by Victoria Giraudo (Head of the Curatorial Department at MALBA), the exhibition will focus on how Brazilian artists shape their own new identity in the 20th century by being part of the international operational models and its currents and/or being aware of their own popular roots, the uniqueness of their country with their racial mixtures, blended heritage of their cultural formation, and contradictions derived from the multiplicity of Brazilian realities. This exhibition features a selection of some 130 works from the 20th century, with key pieces from Anita Malfatti, Tarsila do Amaral, Candido Portinari, Di Cavalcanti, Maria Martins, Lygia Clark, Geraldo de Barros, Antonio Dias, Rubens Gerchman, Helio Oiticica, and Anna Maria Maiolino, among many others. The exhibition will also be in a dialogue with MALBA’s Latin American art collection.