One of the contradictions of art is that, even when dealing with themes that directly appeal to issues that affect us, its reflections are often framed in a context that is only accessible to groups of experts.
Sometimes it happens that thematic exhibitions conceived from cultural spaces accustomed to working in a transdisciplinary manner, incorporate artistic works that point out, insist on or illustrate the issues that the exhibition intends to address. And this is where some ambiguous situations arise, such as the selection of works responding to criteria that subordinate their quality to the subject they address. It may happen that in comparison with the level of experimentation, creativity and audacity of the scientific references included in the exhibition, the artistic proposals seem full of good intentions, but somewhat naive. It may also happen that the context of these exhibitions allows us to discover artists who do not move within the art circuit, let’s call it mainstream, of biennials, large events and museums, more or less approved.
There is nothing better than a few examples to illustrate this reflection that came up in the wake of the exhibition +Humanos. The Future of our Species, organised by the Science Gallery of Trinity College Dublin and presented at the CCCB in Barcelona. +Humanos critically explores the advances and risks of the technological changes we are currently experiencing, proposing various possible paths in which this relationship can be resolved in this post-human future to which we are heading.
In this context, scientific discoveries and experiments, design prototypes, playful proposals and artistic works are shown at the same level, among which anecdotal projects coexist alongside proposals with a broad research base and an impeccable conceptual and formal resolution. And as an example, Addie Wagenknecht and Regina José Galindo address the issue of female stereotypes, but while the former produces spectral images generated from computer algorithms, the latter subjects her own physique to a severe diagnosis by the best specialist in cosmetic surgery in Venezuela, who does not hesitate to point out with a marker on the artist’s body all the plastic interventions he would perform to make her physique fit the ideal parameters of beauty.
Julijonas Urbonas’s “Euthanasia Roller Coaster” is another example that opens an intellectual, ethical and artistic debate with a prototype to resolve the issue of euthanasia. It is an imaginary machine, in the form of a roller coaster, designed based on studies of the body’s reactions in various circumstances, to subject passengers to a series of intense movements that generate unrepeatable experiences that go from euphoria, loss of consciousness and finally death.
[Article published in Bonart, 2016]
