For a few months now, Caixaforum Barcelona has been hosting Qué pensar | qué desear | qué hacer, an exhibition spread over time and presented in three parts. Qué pensar, Qué desear and Qué hacer are the titles of the three consecutive exhibitions that explore the function that art can have in a present marked by redefinition at all levels. Rosa Martínez is the curator of this project, for which she has worked with works from the “la Caixa” collection while incorporating others that function as purchase suggestions. A strategy very similar to that carried out by Kaspar König in his first exhibition as director of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, entitled Museum unserer Wünschen (The Museum of Our Desires, 2001) and in which he exhibited all those works that in his opinion should form part of the museum’s collection. What better arguments to convince an acquisitions committee than to see the works in situ, perfectly installed?
As is usual in her work, Rosa Martínez does not make thoughtful thesis exhibitions, nor is she very fond of presenting archives of documents, but rather understands her work as that of a mediator who creates the context for artistic proposals to be presented in the best possible way. Martínez values everything that art can contribute in terms of presence and experience, as something alive that allows us to reflect on our present.
Rosa Martínez’s career is long and solid. She was a star and regular curator at international biennials, starting with the first edition of Manifesta (1996) in Rotterdam, Istanbul (1997) or Moscow (2005 and 2007), among others. She was also the curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, with Santiago Sierra, whose project left the pavilion in ruins, while preventing entry to anyone who did not have a Spanish identity card, so that a large percentage of visitors to this event based on national pavilions were excluded. Once again, the curator helped to create the best possible situation for the artistic project to be carried out.
And another fact worth remembering here is that Martínez was the director of the Mediterranean Biennial between 1988 and 1992. This was a biennial promoted from Barcelona and focused on emerging art, which worked on aspects such as multidisciplinarity and exchanges between different cities in a specific geographical area. With rather little vision for the future, it was cancelled to make way for the grand plans of Barcelona’92. But that is another story that no longer depends on the curator, although it affects him.
[Article published in Bonart, 2013]
