“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.  In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers’ Guilds struck a map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.  The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that the vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.  In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.”

–Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658. Jorge Luis Borges, Of Exactitude in Science

“When one man has reduced a fact of the imagination to be a fact to his understanding, I foresee that all men will at length establish their lives on that basis.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

The labor of curatorial research and selection normally begins by establishing temporal, spatial or thematic coordinates that delimit the universe of ideas, images and objects being confronted by whomever is carrying it out.  For practical purposes, or, as it were, with the aim of organizing chaos, it is necessary to show its starting point, its time of arrival, and the extent of its scope.

The present selection, however, has not been enclosed by way of temporal or spatial plans (even though these cannot be avoided in one’s passage through the space and time of exhibition), but rather strictly out of an interest in showing a range of artists’ attempts to transgress the systems of reference that define those plans, thereby rethinking the ways in which the world is perceived and its foundations laid.

Artists like Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto, for example, used different strategies, over fifty years ago, to try to break free from the two-dimensional, compositional character associated with painting.  A few decades later, after their ruptures had been assimilated, artists like Stephen Prina, Fernando Ortega, Marlo Pascual and Haris Epaminonda have been working by bringing together images and objects in order to create a sort of continuity between representation and the realm of objects, thereby investigating the two —and three— dimensionality of systems of reference.

The artistic practice of  Valie Export, Sigurdur Gudmundsson and Charles Ray also works with space, but by drawing on the relationship between it and their own bodies.  The works shown here study the construction of the subject on the basis of its location in physical or social space and examine the sculptural qualities of the human body.

The pieces by Jorge Macchi and Francisco Ugarte, by contrast, work with the creation of spatialities by drawing on written language, using evocation and allusion as strategies that also enable them to construct “conceptual” spaces.  The piece by Marcel Broodthaers, which constitutes part of his fictitious museum, later materialized by the artist in his own apartment, is inscribed in this same sense.

Using photography, other artists such as Zoe Leonard, Ryuji Miyamoto, Aart Klein and Edmund Collein work with the representation of natural or urban landscapes, or with formal abstractions that recall the former no less than the latter.  Although most of those photographs refer to places that exist on a map, their representational character confers upon them a fragmentary quality: they are incapable of presenting the completeness of a site.

Finally, the video by Adrien Missika and the piece by Tatiana Trouvé engage perceptual strategies that reorient or exaggerate the structures of our systems of reference in order to invade conventional conceptions of space and time.  In some cases, as laid out in the piece by Jimmie Durham, systems of reference and languages are also systems of power.

It is important to note that the spatial and temporal dimensions that imbue artistic language are employed by the creators selected here in order to break the structures of the system itself.  Sometimes it is only possible to break with certain assumptions by drawing on their own mechanisms.  After all, time and space are also a kind of language, susceptible to being transformed through their uses.

When formal searches succeed in breaking off a chunk of the fabric that we call the universe, an escape hatch is created.  It is through these tears or interstices created from languages that it is possible to see other realities and to practice other perceptions that would lead – or have already led – to different existences.

• Curatorship: Bárbara Cuadriello
• Artists: Marcel Broodthaers, Edmund Collein, Jimmie Durham, Tracey Emin, Haris Epaminonda, Valie Export, Mario García Torres, Anna Gaskell, Félix González­Torres, Sigurdur Gudmundsson, Andre Kertész, Aart Klein, Eva Kotátková, Zoe Leonard, Jorge Macchi, Adrian Missika, Ryuji Miyamoto, Hélio Oiticica, Fernando Ortega, Marlo Pascual, Stephen Prina, Charles Ray, Ugo Rondinone, Tatiana Trouvé, Francisco Ugarte.
• Second curatorship for CIAC’s office, 2015