Prologue

This thing we are calling a prologue, could well be an epilogue, or an afterthought. We are not starting from scratch, we are not even starting, we are turning back. There is a desperate optimism in the triennial (or biennial) repeated attempts to define the present and plant its flag on the future. They are always, somehow, late to the party.  The accelerated temporality with which the artworld picks up and discards its themes and topics only increases this sense that everything becomes prematurely old.

Now that the future has ceased to be the repository of all the unfulfilled promises of modernity to become the source of our planetary anxieties, what is the point of continuing to organise biennials? As an institution that serves to organise the modern and make it legible, what legitimacy does the museum still have?

This Prologue gathers two interventions that deal with these questions better than we could do ourselves. Dora Garcia’s The Kingdom (2003) is part of the permanent collection at MACBA (information about the image emission device of The Kingdom), Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [2001] by Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte was commissioned specifically for this event.

Dora García. The Kingdom (2003-present)

Dora García. The Kingdom (2003-present)

Performance, publication, webcam and video recording Twenty years after its first presentation, the extended performance devised by Dora García in 2003 continues to uncover “holes in the institutional logic”¹ deploying strategies like play, real-time writing, the paranormal and the blurring of the limits between reality and fiction, space and time. Moreover, The Kingdom has been in continuous operation through a security camera that has been streaming online since it was first set up. This webcam – a central element in the work – prefigured regimes of surveillance that have now become ubiquitous, allowing itself to be taken over by any user who wanted to play with and/or control its gaze.

_{¹ Dora García in MACBA’s Audiovisual Documentation Fonds.}

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Verónica Lahitte i Antonio Gagliano. Reconstrucció: Barcelona Art Report [2001] (2023)

Verónica Lahitte i Antonio Gagliano. Reconstrucció: Barcelona Art Report [2001] (2023)

Installation. Various dimensions The single-edition triennial Experiències, Barcelona Art Report [2001] is the case study from which Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte were commissioned. Their joint practice carefully engages with all kinds of archives, were invited to take it as their case study. Their work displayed here not only recalls the memory of a “suspended” triennial, but through what might be called a ‘documentary ventriloquism’ they mediate, navigate, and speculate on Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [2001] from the remnants, documents and voices that still remain in a handful of forgotten filing cabinets in the city.

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artists

Antonio Gagliano

Córdoba, 1982

Dora García

Valladolid, 1965

Verónica Lahitte

In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. [contra]panorama, the second edition of Panorama retains the same aim but works towards it through a year-long series of interventions that take the project’s title literally, in order to question both the continuing relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its capacity to offer a panoramic image of the present.

Related activities

2 results

Performance inspired by the novel The Kingdom by Dora García 

[contra]panorama

Activity

Friday, March 15, 2024

Antonio Gagliano and Verónica Lahitte. Reconstruction: Barcelona Art Report [2001] 

[contra]panorama

Activity

Friday, March 15, 2024