Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation
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Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) Plaça dels Àngels 1, 08001 Barcelona
Image courtesy of MACBA.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation situates Gonzalez-Torres’ work within the postcolonial discourse and the connected histories between Spain and the Americas, especially as these impact present-day questions around memory, authority, freedom and national identity. A particular emphasis is placed on reading Gonzalez-Torres’s work in relation to Spanish, Latin American and Caribbean culture, not as a simple, singular biographical narrative, but rather as a way of complicating any essentialist reading of his work through any single idea, theme or identity. The show proposes various interpretations stemming from this line of investigation and highlights the work’s formative influence on queer aesthetics.
Following the thinking of Martinican writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant, the exhibition emphasizes the idea of the necessity for opacity, rather than either total transparency or instant legibility. The conceptual openness of Gonzalez-Torres’ work parallels Glissant’s position through their shared emphasis on mutability, and through the dynamics as well as the poetics of relation, which could also encompass the politics of relation.
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