Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Zonas de riesgo [Risk Zones] a potential “risk” contained by an exhibition that rummages in those
storage rooms seeking readings of “reality”. It is interesting here to
MADRID construe risk as a condition of possibility, a context in which there
CAIXA FORUM exists a tension, a continuous struggle to break with a status quo.
At all events, the assumption of risk as a metaphor for change leads
us to shed the notion that associates this cause-effect condition with
SUSET SÁNCHEZ something decidedly dreadful, and all the more so when the object of
The vocabulary of paranoia with which today’s societies are saturated the artistic gaze is a social phenomenon and process.
and legitimised by the media, warns of a contradictory fate in which In Consolation Service (1999) Eija-Liisa Ahtila explores the
terms like terror, fear, threat, catastrophe, war, and pandemia are subjectivity of two characters confronting a divorce that will turn
often used to describe phenomena belonging to the social and natural their lives upside down. How to adapt to the change, to the loss, the
spheres. Obviously many events of the recent past can be described emptiness left by the other? Adrian Paci in Centro di Permanenza
in this way, though refracted by the fact that the prism of the ill- Temporanea (2007) addresses emigration as the trigger of changes
fated media paraphernalia that distributes information about them is that occur in the micro-tales of identities and in the complex weave
suspiciously accommodating of history. We might agree that there is a of economic, political, and social relation, in order to evince a
similar manipulation of the pieces that make up curatorial discourses, division of the subject that places him in a permanently borderline
which by the minute come to sustain authentic juggling acts in their condition, between here and there, then and now. Mona Hatoum
constructions of sense. The exhibition, a collection, a curator, are also also alludes to the traces left by displacement. In her Mobile Home
risk zones where symbolic capital is subjected to trading operation (2005-07) there is a poetic vision of the Diaspora achieved with
and is repositioned as an asset. objects that drift slowly, although their motion is limited by bars
Zonas de riesgo. Colección de Arte Contemporáneo Fundación that delimit margins and ghettos, images often used by this artist.
“la Caixa” becomes an example of the historical implications of the In Turbulent (1998) Shirin Neshat places two oppositions, masculine
fact of collecting, interpreting the past and the present and predicting and feminine, to symbolise one of the central issues of otherness
and the gender discourse of Muslim
culture, on this occasion addressed via
the questioning of the law in Iran that
forbids women to sing in front of men.
Using scenes taped In the Maracaná
stadium, Volta (2002-03), by Stephen
Dean, shows those moments condensing
the explosion of a human mass, when the
cathartic form of collective expression
employs a common language to convey
sentiments, instants in which the masses
are liberated, and at the same time
manipulated like a puppet.
Works such as those by Eija-Liisa
Ahtila, Adrian Paci, the sensationalist
installation entitled Welcome to
Guantanamo Museum (2008) by Alicia
Framis, the sensitive metaphors of Mona
Hatoum and Shirin Neshat, or the frenetic
rhythms of the pieces by Miguel Ángel
Ríos and Stephen Dean, all attest to these
multiple territories located in either the
public or the private imagination, or that
traverse both spaces with a pendular
motion, pressure vessels from which there
emerge conflicts within which change is
Partial view of the exhibition. Courtesy: Caixa Forum Madrid. latent.