Other Cartographies
gallery 4
Genealogies and Dissidences. MUAC Collection
This exhibition brings together different artists who have questioned the formalizations of cartography by subverting the map creation process and proposing other representations of the territory. Although maps have historically been conceived as precise, objective tools for ordering the world, cartography is also an instrument for control and appropriation. As the writer Estrella de Diego has argued, the map becomes a cultural convention for a particular power and a translation of its hegemonic vision. In this exhibition, maps don’t simply speak to the limits or scale of a territory, but reveal the colonial, sociopolitical and affective conditions of an entire society.
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.
