Archive for June, 2011

Tearless

Sunday, June 19th, 2011

At the moment I am in Spain, tearlessly working on the installation of The Cry, a group exhibition that Maria Ines Rodriguez and I jointly curated for MUSAC. The title of the exhibition suggests that crying, aside from being a manifestation of a private emotion, is a public call for bearing witness. During the curatorial process, we asked ourselves: What if, for a change, we shift the lens for looking at contemporary art from conceptualism to expressionism? We then looked at what could be thought of as artistic gesture in recent art, and attempted to articulate in the exhibition possible structures of feeling.

The exhibition includes artworks from the 1990s to the present by Absalon, Allora & Calzadilla, Hernan Bas, Irina Botea, Luisa Cunha, Lara Favaretto, Jesper Just, David Maljkovic, Christian Marclay, Teresa Margolles, Olivia Plender, Ugo Rondinone and Javier Téllez; as well as performances by El Resplandor, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, and von Calhau. The exhibition design is a special project by the artist Terence Gower, who developed what we might call an “emotional architecture” (a term coined by the Mexican artist Mathias Goeritz). The graphic designer Scott Ponik made the exhibition title illustration, above.

The Cry opens June 25, 2011, and is on view until January 8, 2012.