The great Tàpies centenary exhibition will star, along with exhibitions dedicated to the grotesque and the duende, in a new season at the Reina Sofía Museum with clear decolonizing airs. It will be Manuel Segade’s first at the head of the institution but, as the exhibitions are planned years in advance, for now he has only been able to introduce one exhibition decided by him: that of Eva Lootz (Vienna, 1940), the Austrian artist who settled in Spain at the end of the Franco regime and has made a large donation to the museum. Along with Tàpies, Lootz and the exhibitions of the grotesque and the duende there will also be a large exhibition of the enigmatic, nomadic and mystical James Lee Byars and another of Grada Kilomba, one of the fundamental artists of the African diaspora in Europe, who works on memory , trauma and postcolonialism and that has examined the patterns of microracism that operate in the old continent.
At a time when the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, talks about decolonizing Spanish museums, the Reina Sofía will not only host the exhibition of Kilomba or that of Byars, influenced by non-Western spiritualities, but Segade will reopen at the end of this month the rooms of the collection titled Device 92: can history be rewound? , which opened two years ago and after a few weeks had to close due to a problem with the opening license. They show, based on the splendor that Spain experienced in 1992, the critical reading that many artists made about colonial control and European imperialism.
Asked about the decolonization of museums, Segade stated yesterday that “they are unavoidable themes within contemporary art, not only because they are themes of the present that artists work on, but because they are part of the genetics of contemporary art itself, whose birth coincides with the second wave of feminism, the LGBT liberation movements of Stonewall, the class revolts of May 68 and the latest decolonization processes of the countries of the global south and the old European empires. And from that the present itself is built. The new social positions that were organized around this axis in the sixties, race, gender and social class, are always in the background of contemporary art and, above all, in that presence of bodies, forms and material cultures. .
Regarding the specific programming, Segade recalled that the exhibition on Tàpies that opens on February 20, co-produced together with the Fundació Tàpies and the Bozar of Brussels and curated – like that of Kilomba – by his predecessor, Manuel Borja-Villel, will be “a “one of the largest ever made” and larger than those in Barcelona and Brussels because the ceilings of the Reina Sofía allow for large formats.
As for James Lee Byars, who will arrive in May, he said that “he is one of the most eccentric conceptual artists”, marked by the new Asian philosophies that landed in the sixties in the West and that led him to “a very deep conceptual spirituality: Now that young artists are increasingly focusing on new esotericisms, cosmogonies that are not Western, of indigenous peoples that open other fields of thought that are not the overwhelming logic of our Enlightenment, it is important to have him.” His installations will be seen in the Palacio de Velázquez del Retiro, which will close for renovations after the exhibition.
Regarding the Eva Lootz exhibition, Segade pointed out that it is “a necessary tribute.” Lootz is one of the plastic innovators who landed in Spain in the sixties and worked in a rural context, like Adolfo Schlosser and Mitsuo Miura. And she has developed projects linked to nature, reflection on language and even on the very current hydraulic policy.
At the end of September, the exhibition of the Valencian Soledad Sevilla (1944), winner of the Velázquez Prize, will arrive, and Esperpento will open in October. A sample of thesis and decolonization regarding the Anglo-Saxon concepts with which we understand the world today. For Segade, “the idea of ??esperpento is the great contribution to the aesthetic theory of the avant-garde from the Spanish countryside, which was first formulated by Valle-Inclán from Luces de Bohemia and which has become an aesthetic-political category that serves to interpret many evolutions of modernity understood from the south.”
The other major thesis exhibition of the season will be in November In the moved air…, a title taken from Lorca’s Romance de la luna, luna, which for theorists is the poem, said Segade, that defines the idea of ??duende. And under which curator Georges Didi-Huberman will explore the thinking of emotions and affects in response to new fascisms. Or “how the air moves when a political emotion tears away from the meaning of an artistic work,” stressed Segade, who announced the new deputy artistic director of the Reina Sofía, chosen from among 52 candidates and who was already part of the museum’s advisory committee: Amanda de la Garza (Mexico, 1981), current head of the Mexican MUAC, “the most important museum of contemporary art in Latin America,” said the director.
