Activating the Collection

Activating the Collection is a new series of exhibitions that examines the Museo Tamayo’s permanent collection. It is not only about studying and interpreting the collection, but also about setting it in motion in relation to space, history and the public. The process involves a theatrical staging of the collection’s works through artistic and curatorial projects dealing with various modes of exhibition design and performative practice.

Into the Belly of a Dove

For this first show in the Activating the Collection series, the Museo Tamayo invited Vilnius-raised curator Raimundas Malašauskas to take stock of the collection and re-conceive it from a different perspective. In turn, Malašauskas developed Lithuanian architect Valdas Ozarinskas’s idea of “shrinking the museum ‘museographically’ speaking” and asked two artists, Gintaras Didžiapetris and Rosalind Nashashibi, to participate in a continuous dialogue about the project’s conceptualization. Their exhibition is based on the curatorial premise that everything is possible and no less is real: it is a negotiation between scales and, appearances, intestines and destinies.

Various criteria intervened in the selection of works for this show. One of these concerned the works’ exhibition history—for instance, Giuseppe Rivadossi’s La mia casa had not been shown in a long time. Another criterion dealt with repetition in different formats, whereby certain pieces have been documented and form part of the museum’s formal or informal archives: a good example of this is Lynn Chadwick’s sculptures. The origin of the collection’s pieces is another research topic: the artists and curator looked into the personal or professional history that ties Rufino Tamayo to certain pieces, in an attempt to understand how they were incorporated into the collection—as in the case of Henri Laurens’s tapestry.

In Into the Belly of a Dove, works from the permanent collection are shown alongside photographs that reflect upon archival images of them in previous exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo. Moreover, Francisco Cruz—known by many staff members over the years simply as Maestro Cruz and who has been in charge of the photographic documentation of exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo for over twenty years—took a series of pictures during the installation process of Into the Belly of a Dove. These photographic records depict variations on the show’s present layout, once again adding to the confusion in the scale and appearance of galleries and exhibited artworks.

Venue: Museo Rufino Tamayo

View post by Pablo Leon de la Barra from 21 Apr 2010