Marcelo Expósito

This exhibition, the first retrospective of Expósito’s work, covers nearly four decades of pieces and interventions that, as expressed in its title, conceive the designation of something as whether art or politics as “a tactical decision.” The variety of his productions and initiatives, which take form in films, texts, installations, academic and research experiences, as well as the production of artifacts and diagrams, share the common element of proposing aesthetic-political “ways of doing,” to cite the title of one his most well-known books.

The exhibition outlines the utopia of a “New Babylon,” where the public sphere is constituted through the excavation of the memory of resistance, the archaeology of apparatuses of power and the interrogation of sensory experiences that aspire to becoming an experience of emancipation. At a time in which the aftershocks of neoliberalism and the crisis of the nation-state confront us with a variety of new fascisms, Expósito’s work raises an urgent question: what is that which art additionally needs or what needs to be added to it to confront this crisis?
 

New Babylon: Whether or Not to Appoint a Work as Art Is a Tactical Decision has been coproduced by Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona, in collaboration with Casa de Iberoamérica in Cádiz and the Fundación Luis Seoane in A Coruña. In a parallel fashion, Expósito will present New Babylon: First Dream and Storm at the Centro Cultural de España en Mexico (CCEMx).


Artist: Marcelo Expósito (Puertollano, 1966)

Curators: Valentín Roma and Cuauhtémoc Medina, in collaboration with Virginia Roy