Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

This curatorial proposal delves into the IVAM collection to project other insights towards the contemporary. And it does so by inviting us to approach the pieces from a broader and more complex perspective, a new angle which leaves the door open to the potential connections and interpretations that may arise in this space of the exhibition.

With it, an exercise is configured through which artistic, social and cultural contexts are analyzed from another point of view, events that can be tracked throughout the works and which reveal the impulses or vacuums that put the identity of history at risk.

In this sense, the exhibition doesn’t teach; it simply accompanies us on a journey so we can feel free to fill those voids with our own meanings. The exhibition is configured as a tool that offers us the opportunity to generate other readings of the works, viewpoints that are equally valid, given that they are based on the uniqueness of each experience.

This project uses the pieces as a necessary central thread which helps us to reflect on various themes, such as the changing nature of the museum institution, the role of the artist and their identity, or the anticipations of different movements that changed our responses to art. It does this using different artistic languages that bring us a little closer to that concept of what we understand as contemporaneity.

The pieces displayed will take on other meanings depending on the perspective from which they are analyzed. They also show us that, in this present that surrounds us where everything can mean anything, there is nothing better than coming to a blurred territory to discover that perhaps the interesting thing is not defining what is contemporary, but discovering when it is.

Process and participation are central elements in Carolina Caycedo’s art, which offers a collective dimension through installations, drawings, performances, photographs and videos. Her work contributes to the construction of an environmental memory as an essential space for the climate and social justice. She challenges us to see nature not as a resource to be exploited, but as a living and spiritual entity that unites people beyond borders. Through her studio and field work with communities affected by large-scale infrastructure and other extraction projects, Caycedo invites viewers to understand the unsustainable pace of growth under capitalism and how we can embrace resistance and solidarity. Movement, migration, connection, languages and exchanges are key concepts in her work, which she approaches with a strong ethical and feminist commitment. Through indigenous cosmologies and decolonial discourses, she proposes counternarratives to extractivism and violence in the world.

For Caycedo’s first exhibit in Europe, Artium (Vitoria) and IVAM (Valencia) present a general approach to her art over the last twenty years. This exhibit brings together works from important series, such as Be Dammed (2012–ongoing), a multimedia project that examines the impact that hydroelectric dams and other major infrastructure projects have on communities and the environment. The exhibit will also present an iteration of the Street Museum, one of Caycedo’s first projects. It was first developed in Bogotá, Colombia, as part of the artist collective Colectivo Cambalache in 1998. It has since been revised and adapted with various configurations for projects in different locations. The project focuses on barter and redistribution understood as a form of social connection and research process. It is a key example of the circular economy that supports waste reduction, while promoting social cohesion.

Caycedo was born in London to Colombian parents. She lives in Los Angeles. Her recent individual exhibits include: Land of Friends, Baltic, Newcastle (2022); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (with David de Rozas) (2021); MCA Chicago (2020); ICA Boston (2020); Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź (2019). She has participated in multiple group exhibits including the 15th Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador (2021), We Are History, Somerset House, London (2021); LA TRIENAL 20/21, El Museo de Barrio, New York (2021); the Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019).

Exhibition in collaboration with:

This proposal aims to jointly explore the work of female artists in Spain and Portugal in the final years of the dictatorship and the beginnings of democracy.

The historical evolution of both countries in those years has many points in common. Both Spain and Portugal suffered long dictatorships, an authoritarian and repressive regime, marked by the veneration of the leader and a state organisation that resembled fascism, but with a traditionalist and Catholic component that distinguished them from others. In fact, both regimes would adopt the same motto to summarise their ideology: “God, country and family”.

In the sixties and early seventies, the presence of female artists increased significantly in both countries, particularly in alternative circles and in opposition to the regime. When we examine the production of Spanish and Portuguese artists of the time, we see that they adopted a wide range of media and styles: abstraction and normative art, traditional realism, pop art and critical realism, conceptualism and neo-Dadaism, among others. Not all of them were concerned with reflecting on the female condition, but a significant number of the works produced by women in those years had to do, in one way or another, with themes close to the feminist agenda; such as the sexual division of labour, the social construct of societal roles, motherhood, domesticity or sexual violence. However, this feminist or proto-feminist aspect was ignored by most of the critics of the time (and even denied, on many occasions, by the artists themselves). It was not until a few years ago that some Spanish and Portuguese historians began to study the political dimension of many of these works.

This exhibit aims to reevaluate the work of Spanish and Portuguese artists at the time, taking into account their specificities with respect to the Anglo-Saxon model and highlighting the multiple parallels that we can find between them. It will also be an opportunity to investigate possible moments of exchange and encounter between artists from both countries.

Exhibition coproduced with:

Collaboration: