From a Bird’s Lap
gallery 4
Genealogies and Dissidences. MUAC Collection
This exhibition reveals itself as a repertory of approaches to our natural surroundings, its elements and the living beings that find a home there. This selection of pieces from the MUAC Collection challenges the primacy of the horizon line and the panoramic view as the primary approach to the environment, tracing ways of perceiving nature through intimate experience and by acknowledging the material characteristics of living things. By questioning the primacy of the gaze, these artistic strategies instead involve embodied experiences or phenomenological encounters that offer alternatives to the obsolete opposition between humans and nature.
For the past decade and a half, MUAC has built a collection of art produced since 1952 without intending that the artworks, documents and histories it contains would ever constitute a unified, geographic, linear or identitarian narrative. As is intrinsic to contemporary art collections, this sampling of the living, controversial culture of our times implies groupings and lineages as well as solitary, dissident adventures. It would betray this heterogeneity to present our collection as a simplified whole. Nevertheless, the growth and maturation of our archives suggests that it is no longer convenient to conceal their complexity behind general thematic presentations.
Genealogies and Dissidences represents a new phase in which the museum’s collections occupy a dedicated section of the building through the simultaneous exhibition of a variety of cores, which will be periodically renewed. These cores can be historical explorations, the presentation of a large-scale installation or essayistic groupings. We hope that this multiple, discontinuous presentation does justice to the way in which we increasingly appreciate art and culture, precisely because it allows us a multitude of bursts of matter and meaning.
