Collection XIV: Public
10 Nov 2016 - 29 Jan 2017
COLLECTION XIV: PUBLIC
Until 29 January 2017
Curated by CA2M, DIDDCC
The backbone of any museum institution is its collection. Looking after it, expanding it, fostering the production of knowledge based on research into it, and offering it on view to the general public are what makes the museum an institution that develops over time. But the collection is also what turns it into a temporary utopia, into a chronotope: by grouping together various different fragments of past times, narratives of history are woven together and disentangled within the collection in order to shape a present still in the making, a destiny tied in with the museum itself in ongoing transformation.
The constantly growing accrued heritage of the art centre is made up of the CA2M Collection –the Community of Madrid’s contemporary art collection consisting of around 1700 artworks– and the Fundación ARCO Collection – the private collection of Madrid’s contemporary art fair on deposit here since 2014, made up of 311 artworks. All decisions on how the public collection grows and develops are taken by the Acquisitions Advisory Committee which meets twice a year. The museum also has its own in-house management, registry and restoration team whose responsibility is to look after the conservation and diffusion of both collections.
CA2M’s mandate is eminently public: its activities are free and open to all kinds of audiences and participants. With this exhibition we want to show how our collection grows by focusing on its last year: How does the collection grow? Who decides which direction it should take? What public investment goes into it? To pose these questions, the exhibition is conceived as a processual space in transition: by means of the direct participation of the different social agents who take part in the centre’s education and activities programmes, we hope to generate a greater collective knowledge of the centre itself and its collection.
On one hand, DIDDCC (Departamento de Investigación, Datos, Documentación, Cuestionamiento y Causalidad) , a four-month workshop led by Sergio Rubira and with eighteen participants, will question the narratives and conventions which the collection sets in place within the museum. The end results from their discussions and their findings will gradually be added into the exhibition halls through certain artworks and documentation with the purpose of enriching the open narrative of the collection from the viewpoint of the present. On the other hand, the exhibition spaces are open to the intervention of the artist Julia Spínola and the participants in the family workshop They got closer, they got bigger during the weekends.
Visiting the collection, interpreting it, enjoying it and deciding to while away the time with it are ways of taking part that are precisely what give the centre its public dimension: in the negotiation between society and its culture, to which the museum and its collection endeavour to offer various possibilities of representation.
Until 29 January 2017
Curated by CA2M, DIDDCC
The backbone of any museum institution is its collection. Looking after it, expanding it, fostering the production of knowledge based on research into it, and offering it on view to the general public are what makes the museum an institution that develops over time. But the collection is also what turns it into a temporary utopia, into a chronotope: by grouping together various different fragments of past times, narratives of history are woven together and disentangled within the collection in order to shape a present still in the making, a destiny tied in with the museum itself in ongoing transformation.
The constantly growing accrued heritage of the art centre is made up of the CA2M Collection –the Community of Madrid’s contemporary art collection consisting of around 1700 artworks– and the Fundación ARCO Collection – the private collection of Madrid’s contemporary art fair on deposit here since 2014, made up of 311 artworks. All decisions on how the public collection grows and develops are taken by the Acquisitions Advisory Committee which meets twice a year. The museum also has its own in-house management, registry and restoration team whose responsibility is to look after the conservation and diffusion of both collections.
CA2M’s mandate is eminently public: its activities are free and open to all kinds of audiences and participants. With this exhibition we want to show how our collection grows by focusing on its last year: How does the collection grow? Who decides which direction it should take? What public investment goes into it? To pose these questions, the exhibition is conceived as a processual space in transition: by means of the direct participation of the different social agents who take part in the centre’s education and activities programmes, we hope to generate a greater collective knowledge of the centre itself and its collection.
On one hand, DIDDCC (Departamento de Investigación, Datos, Documentación, Cuestionamiento y Causalidad) , a four-month workshop led by Sergio Rubira and with eighteen participants, will question the narratives and conventions which the collection sets in place within the museum. The end results from their discussions and their findings will gradually be added into the exhibition halls through certain artworks and documentation with the purpose of enriching the open narrative of the collection from the viewpoint of the present. On the other hand, the exhibition spaces are open to the intervention of the artist Julia Spínola and the participants in the family workshop They got closer, they got bigger during the weekends.
Visiting the collection, interpreting it, enjoying it and deciding to while away the time with it are ways of taking part that are precisely what give the centre its public dimension: in the negotiation between society and its culture, to which the museum and its collection endeavour to offer various possibilities of representation.