'The next mutation' or how to avoid extinction
CaixaForum is proposing a collective exhibition of artists from different generations who explore the relationship between art and life from a collective and ecological perspective.
Life on Mother Earth, Gaia, is a web of ecosystems that seems to be moving ever closer to collapse. At least when it comes to human beings. The cloning of the same unsustainable way of life — globalisation — puts us on the edge of the abyss, ready to die like flies the moment the next mutation appears.
We've seen it recently. The pandemic has shaken the planet and has disrupted our lifestyles. The virus, a life or death entity, drives the human species to extinction and forcibly pushes it towards the transformation of yet unknown implications. Like a subversive agent rising from the depths of genetic history, the virus lurks and reveals a fragile and uncertain work.
The next mutation focuses on those artistic practices that, since the 1960s, help understand the world from interdependence and plurality, starting from the object. The exhibition shows how the artists have elaborated their creations by appealing to viewers' sensorial capacity to involve them effectively so that the hegemony of representation in art history gives way to performativity, which links them and makes them participants.
Curated by Xavier Acarín Wieland, the exhibition encourages multiple combinations between the object and the subject who observes it. It propels both towards a horizon of transformation, a testing ground in which they interact, and ultimately serves to make the latter abandon self-sufficiency and see the world as a process of coexistence. Following this idea, the virus and mutation represent sudden breaks in continuity that disrupt normality and give the opportunity to start collective paths towards new horizons.
The next mutation has the collaboration of the Museu d'Art Contemporàni de Barcelona (MACBA) and gathers works by Absalon, Nacho Criado, Eva Fábregas, Cyprien Gaillard, Dora García, Eulalia Garcia Valls, Gego, Isa Genzken, Félix González-Torres, Joan Jonas, Antoni Llena, Àngels Ribé, Victor Ruiz Colomer and Joe Highton, Wolfgang Tillmans, Francesc Torres and Moisès Viellèlia.
Tickets are 6 euros and can be bought through this link.
Precisely, to activate the public's relationship with the exhibition and take into consideration the ecological consequences of the systems that surround us, on 11 December at 12 p.m., artist Eulàlia Garcia Valls will lead a group workshop around Montjuïc, called Subsòls, to listen to and record everything that happens at ground level when we walk. With the materials recorded by participants, Garcia Valls will create an audio piece for the exhibition. Spots are limited, and the price to take part is 6 euros. You can book your ticket by clicking here.