VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
In the new IVAM exhibition there are streets without people and a cell with bars, in addition to having the word “home” in the title, which connects it very directly with the cataract of events that a small virus called COVID-19 has unleashed throughout the globe.. Does it sound familiar to you? Premonitory, no? What is our home? is the title of the exhibition that the IVAM and the museum MAXXi from Rome began to develop two years ago on the idea of home as an intimate and private space, both a public square and a social place. There are twelve facilities, many of them never seen in Spain, who reflect, sometimes in a contradictory way, about the multiple ways of understanding and creating our environment. Environment understood as a physical space, Yeah, but also as a mental space that conditions us and builds us as social and individual beings.. The first work, outside the room, es Faradayurt by the Czechoslovakian artist Jana Sterbak, a kind of yurt made of polyester and covered with copper that isolates us from the physical environment (electromagnetic waves generated by telephones do not penetrate here, radio and television) and mentally. Installation Fun House of Richard Hamilton, John Voelcker y John McHale tests all our senses with optical illusions, sounds and striking images; Francis Alÿs shows in 80 slides to “sleepers” (Sleepers), the remains of capitalist society, who survive as marginal beings in the mammoth Mexico City.; Kara Walker denounces the mental prison in which black slaves in the United States lived, subject to strict control and surveillance, Atelier Van Lieshout imagine a dystopian city with organic shapes in which each building, street or square are designed for a certain political purpose; y Gabriele Basilico, in a premonitory way, photograph Mediterranean cities like Naples, Valencia or Beirut in which not a single person appears, how we have seen them horrified during the viral confinement that we have experienced in Spain.
The Chilean Alfredo Year puts us in a prison to symbolize the restrictions that contemporary societies impose on critical thinking, but once inside, two large mirrors that extend the room to infinity tell us that there is always a gap of freedom, that imagination and thought make us a little freer. Linked to Povera art, the milanese Mario Merz presents the most spectacular installation of the entire tour. Untitled, made a year before he died, It is an igloo made of steel, glass and neon, one of the most primitive and unknown constructions of humanity assembled in this case with modern materials that architects like Mies Van del Rhoe began to use so that nature could penetrate the home and that have subsequently become elements for surveillance. It seems so, Architectural forms and their materials condition our most everyday actions. Bruce Nauman presents a solid architectural structure that evokes the underground tunnels of the cities, very far from tranquility, the shelter and comfort of home; and the south african William Kentridge becomes poetic to denounce the colonialist mentality of Europe at the end of the 19th century. resorting to The magic Flute, no more no less. The artist recreates the famous opera in a small theater to link the libretto, composed by Mozart shortly before the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt, with the dominance of the white man over the African continent. Finally, the couple formed by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov pick up at the facility Where is pur place? three different eras playing with levels and scales: a 19th century art hall visited by giant characters, black and white photographs along with poetic texts and, under the parquet, models of coastal landscapes that refer to the art of the future. The conclusion is that art and architecture allow us to invent new spaces, new ways of living together, build and imagine. AU
