Two Readings On the Collection

The Return of the Imaginary. Realism Between XIX and XX

Dates: May 20 - August 30, 2010
Place: Sabatini building, Floor 3
Inauguration:Wednesday, May 19, 2010. Invite only.

Related Activities: Entrevista Rosa Barba y Juan Luis Moraza

Juan Luis Moraza, Return of the imaginary. Realism Between XIX and XXI

Rosa Barba, A Curated Conference

History becomes effective to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being, wrote Michel Foucault. For most of its existence, the museum has done the exact opposite. Far from recognising the tension between the inscrutability of meaning and the opening to another language in the modern art work, the museum has watered it down to a contemplation that has become an auratic ritual frozen in a distant past. Dos lecturas sobre la colección (Two readings on the collection), along with La Colección Reescrita (Rewriting The Collection)represents an attempt to reintroduce the staging of diverse timeframes and heterogeneous periods involving the historical narrative and its own materiality within the museum. In so far as it is an institution that orders objects, artefacts, documents and the relationships between these things and the public in a series of narrations, the museum must consider not only which stories it is to tell, but also what devices to employ for their narration. In its curatory role, the museum is aware that in order to reintegrate art as an anomaly or symptom, in the style of Didi-Huberman, it must not only explore the histories that it includes, but also the forms in which this historicity is presented.

A Curated Conference.
On the Future of Collective Strength Within an Archive

Two readings on the collection are two ways of looking at this temporary discontinuity by making a theme of the very same devices that they are constructed from. On the one hand, Juan Luis Moraza uncovers a history buried in various chronological layers, presented as a pure accumulation of images, objects and documents. El retorno de lo imaginario. Realismos entre XIX y XXI (Return of the imaginary. Realism between XIX and XXI) alludes to anachronism as the staging of time and to the history of art as the anthropology of image through a homage to Juan Antonio Ramírez, staunch defender of art history as an iconic-verbal discourse. On the other hand, Rosa Barba avoids interpreting the past with the categories of that very same past, presenting in Una conferencia comisariada (A curated conference) a choreographed collection of multiple artistic declarations relating to how memory transforms the past.