Art, That Endless River

The Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires presents its new 2023 programme, El arte, ese río interminable [Art, That Endless River], which will extend across exhibitions throughout its galleries from April to August. This ambitious programme aims to showcase the power of the contemporary art scene in Argentina from the 1960s to the present. Over the course of this period, the country has been home to one of the world’s most vibrant and interdisciplinary artistic communities, one that has been at the forefront of experimentation and has acted in response to a turbulent context marked by a myriad of economic, political and social challenges. Despite many highly vulnerable experiences, Argentina’s artistic community has found strength in adversity and has been able to create – free of speculations or concessions – complex and vital, political and anti-establishment art, defying conventions and the latest trends, expressed through powerful, mature and internationally relevant voices. El arte, ese río interminable is a quote from the final verse of Jorge Luis Borges’ Arte poetica [The Art of Poetry], in which the great Argentinean writer reflects on the poiesis, or power, of art, which in itself has the power to create reality. Our 2023 exhibition programme has that same ambition in mind: to reveal the power of Argentinean art as an agent capable of transforming both historical and current realities.

In November, the Museo Moderno will host the annual conference of CIMAM, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art. More than two hundred museum directors from around the world will attend this annual meeting to discuss the role of contemporary art museums. Bearing in mind our responsibility to present the art of Argentina to the museum’s diverse audiences as well as to local and international guests, the Museo Moderno’s curatorial team took on the challenge of designing a wide-ranging programme of new exhibitions that, together, offer multiple ways of accessing the infinite and varied history of contemporary artistic creation in Argentina. El arte, ese río interminable thus seeks to present a plurality of artists and movements from the country’s art scene and to show what identifies us as a country and region, our exuberant territory, our ancestral knowledge, as well as our culture, dreams, anxieties, questions and challenges. It also seeks to provide an account of the substantial interdisciplinary nature of our art, since the title of the overall programme and those of each of the exhibitions it includes have all been drawn from the works of our greatest writers and poets, thus offering a more thorough representation of everything we are.

To build this ambitious programme, the Museo Moderno delved into much research and approached the 1970s from different points of view. Juguetes rabiosos [Mad Toys], curated by Patricio Orellana, brings together works by important Argentinean artists that can be found in the museum’s collection. These are artists who reshaped the history of the decade and of contemporary art through gestures of destruction and dematerialisation, and attitudes that may or may not have been playful, but were always ground-breaking and never conformist. La vida nuevamente [Life Anew], curated by Francisco Lemus, focuses on the emergence in the history of modern and contemporary dance in Argentina of avant-garde women who, at the Instituto Di Tella and other spaces around the city in the 1970s, made an imprint with their extremely audacious, experimental attitudes.

The museum also pays homage to artist Nicolás García Uriburu with the exhibition Manifiesto verde [Green Manifesto], which showcases the pioneering ecological art that he created as early as the 1960s. This exhibition presents curator Alejandra Aguado’s pictorial thesis, developed in dialogue with guest artist Florencia Böhtlingk, on important Argentinean painters who are interested in recognising and protecting the vigour of the natural world, that “wild super-organism of which we are a part”. There is also A 18 minutos del sol [18 Minutes from the Sun], an exhibition that focuses on the territory and has an all-encompassing vision. Curated by Javier Villa and Marcos Krämer, it continues a project promoted by the Moderno for several years now: an investigation of Argentina’s federal artistic production. On this ambitious occasion, the exhibition presents the diverse worldviews of modern and contemporary Argentinean artists from extremely diverse backgrounds, as well as their examinations and perceptions of science, esotericism and fiction. The exhibition, in turn, engages in a dialogue with the staging of El borde de sí mismo [The Edge of Itself], the theatre cycle conceived by Alejandro Tantanian for the Museo Moderno which, in this latest edition, has been co-curated by Javier Villa. It will take the shape of dialogues that drift between the visual and the performing arts, pushing the limits of each discipline, and re-emerging with a new, unprecedented and surprising perspective.

The Museo Moderno will also soon present Sofía Torres Kosiba: Bravaria, one of the solo exhibitions that is the result of the work undertaken throughout the country by Raúl Flores, curator of the Moderno’s Federal Programme. Later, in August, we will feature an exhibition by artists Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolás Goldberg, curated by Javier Villa, which will look at the cultural and scientific history of the Campo del Cielo meteorites that fell to earth more than 4,000 years ago in what are now the provinces of Chaco and Santiago del Estero.

Finally, the programme will close with the exhibitions Cultura colibrí [Hummingbird Culture] and Cien caminos en un solo día [One Hundred Roads in a Day]. Curated by Jimena Ferreiro, these exhibitions put two recent turning points in Argentinean art at centre stage. The first is based on her research into sexual exiles during the last military dictatorship, the return to democracy, and the celebratory experimentation of the bodies of the counterculture in the 1980s and 1990s. The second focuses on the strength of the artistic ideas that burst onto the scene following the country”s economic crisis of 2001, when the Argentinean financial system collapsed. On a monumental urban landscape created especially for this exhibition by artist Luciana Lamothe, a dozen Argentinean artists who work with the materials they have at hand in the city – understood as a laboratory – investigate the possibilities of a vital, dramatic and playful urban art that rises from the rubble.

The group exhibitions bring together works from the Museo Moderno’s own collection, loans from institutions and private collectors as well as major commissions. Manifiesto verde [Green Manifesto], by Florencia Böhtlingk; Juguetes rabiosos [Mad Toys], by Joaquín Aras; Cultura colibrí [Hummingbird Culture], by the poet Fernando Noy; and Cien caminos en un solo día [One Hundred Roads in a Day], by Luciana Lamothe are  four works especially designed for  the 2023 programme, which were based on its themes and time periods, and conceived through dialogue by these incisive, sensible Argentinean artists very much interested in the periods and themes proposed. We are therefore immensely grateful to these four guest artists for their dedication and generosity.