Exhibitions
Archaeologies of the present: memory and conflict in the ADN Gallery
The collection as a critical device from which to read the tensions that run through contemporaneity.
Present Archeologies proposes a reading of the present based on the mechanisms of accumulation and memory. The exhibition, organized around works by AT Collection and curated by Antonio Toca, within the program The Collector Is Present 2026 , understands collecting as a form of critical construction of contemporary time.
Far from being organized by stylistic or generational affinities, the exhibition functions as a montage of layers where each work activates a specific tension. Pieces by Ai Weiwei, Alfredo Jaar, Regina José Galindo, Eugenio Merino or Antoine d'Agata coexist with works by artists from different generations and contexts, configuring a space crossed by political violence, affective precariousness, war, repression or the erosion of social structures. There is no illustrative intention or linear narrative; the exhibition is constructed from the friction between images, documents and material gestures that operate as remnants of an unstable contemporaneity.
Alfredo Jaar, No poetry will serve, 2023.
The term “archaeologies” here does not refer to a retrospective look, but to an excavation of the immediate. The works appear as traces of still open processes, fragments that allow us to read the forms of violence and decomposition that cross the present. In this sense, the exhibition avoids both the spectacle of denunciation and any decorative dimension of political commitment. Its position is drier: to provide images capable of sustaining an ethical interrogation of what usually remains naturalized.
The proposal also displaces the traditional role of the collector. Antonio Toca presents himself as someone who constructs a reading device. The collection thus acquires a discursive dimension: each addition modifies the meaning of the whole and turns the act of collecting into a practice of cultural and political articulation. Present Archeologies insists precisely on the possibility of understanding contemporary art as a space of critical intervention rather than as an autonomous or self-sufficient territory.
Abel Azcona, The shame, 2024.
You may be
interested
...
