Opening: Thursday October 19th 6pm
On the occasion of MAMBO's 60th anniversary, its chief curator Eugenio Viola has undertaken the task of rethinking the museum’s collection. This mission gave rise to a curatorial exercise whereby we agreed to entrust Argentine artist Adriana Bustos with the challenge of devising an intervention aimed at activating certain parts of this cultural heritage.
Her proposal is "to approach the collection through an installation based on an genealogy of a collection which functions as a visual and mental training device bringing together the reference and the document. It could thus be something like a map and its territory represented simultaneously".
Bustos usually "organizes" diverse universes along the lines of cartographies and constellations: modes of representation that contribute to giving visibility to different configurations that coexist -in this case - in the same corpus of works. In the artist's words, "the works selected from the collection will form a constellation around this piece".
This hypothesis of visual articulation raises multiple questions that seek to imbue the interpretation of the collection with different meanings, all with the intention of reviewing presences and absences that allow for a rereading of the museum's history. This intervention is based on questions such as: what is the first work by a woman incorporated into the collection? What works by black or Afro-descendant artists are in the collection? Are there any works that represent black and native people?
Diana B. Wechsler
