For some time now, the programming of contemporary art museums and foundations has not been mainly based on exhibitions and projects curated by independent (or “multi-dependent” to be more precise) collaborators outside the institution. The crisis of the institutions, which is both economic and identity-related, is responsible for the fact that collections have returned to the forefront of their programming. Collections are alive, they evolve and show the origins and DNA of museums, they shape their identity and personality. Although it may be more rewarding for museums to show their “star pieces” again and again (a Jeff Wall here, a Gerhard Richter there), it is much more risky and enriching to try to create new stories and provide fresh perspectives on their works. This is precisely what the “la Caixa” Foundation has been doing for quite some time. With the cycle “The Artist’s View”, it welcomed the “views” of Juan Uslé and Luis Gordillo or, more recently, by Rosa Martínez, with the three-part exhibition What to Think? What to wish for? What to do? Caixaforum is now launching a programme called Comisart (yes, the name could have been a little more sophisticated) aimed at emerging curators, a concept that “la Caixa” translates as “under 40 years old and whose experience includes the realisation of three curatorial projects”. The first of the three proposals in this programme is Arte Ficción (Fiction Art). And the title is the least appropriate part of this project, curated by Jaime González Cela and Manuela Pedrón Nicolau, which starts from the classic parameters of science fiction to generate a different story, a proposal that activates the works in a way that has never been done before. It is true that science fiction is a genre that, from a temporal distance, allows us to analyse the present in a critical way and even to predict a future that is not always encouraging if we think of Blade Runner, 1984 or The Road. Jaime González Cela and Manuela Pedrón Nicolau place us in an indeterminate space and time, in which the absence of the human figure is striking, which only appears alienated in Aernout Mik’s video installation. The selected works project other worlds, show parallel dimensions or present objects that respond to other realities. In the exhibition we find the Disney-ized cities of Ante Timmermans, the marine horizons of Hiroshi Sugimoto, the strange and obsessive behaviors of the protagonists of Aernout Mik, the stopped-time clock of Jorge Barbi, the paradoxical signs of Rogelio López Cuenca or the bicycle loaded with bags as an icon of a nomadic and homeless life of Andreas Slominski. But the curatorial narrative is not only shaped by the spatial arrangement of the works, but by a very measured intervention as a path to follow (with lines literally painted on the floor) and by interrelating the works based on classic concepts in the field of science fiction, such as utopia, dystopia, cataclysm, genesis, paradox and virus. Because it is true that the works can speak for themselves, but what we must ask of an exhibition is that it be able to articulate a narrative, from among the many possible ones, and to generate a situation or a universe in which we feel called upon. And Arte Ficción (despite the title) achieves this.
