Just into its second year of activities, the MUAC (Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo /UNAM) announces two exhibitions, which conclude the current Cycle, under the title of Territories of Desire.
By working with the structure of a Seminar, the MUAC's curatorial program has been developed in the form of Cycles designed to provide the temporary exhibitions with an evolving theoretical framework intended to provoke an indepth reflection on the historical and philosophical implications surrounding contemporary art practice.
The starting point for Territories of Desire began by exploring Georges Bataille's notion of non-productive expenditure (La Critique Sociale, 1933), with an extremely successful period that included three exhibitions: Petit Mal; Ci/do Meireles; A Factory, a Machine, a Body. The second phase of this cycle moves toward Gilles Deleuze's theory on the theme of desire (Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus, 1972) with Dias & Riedweg's The Periphery of your Eyes, and the final two shows of this series:
Félix González Torres - Some-where/ No-where, is an exhibition originated at MALBA in Argentina. Curator Sonia Becce's approach is embedded in the artist's sensuality, proving that it is possible to disseminate a clearly political message without sacrificing the beauty and subtlety of the work. This subversive aspect is not tainted by violence, nor does it refer to any direct political action. It seems more like an aesthetic intervention that manages to permeate between the social and the private: "At this point I do not want to be outside the structure of power, I do not want to be the opposition, the alternative. Alternative to what: To power? No. I want to have power. It's effective in terms of change. I want to be like a virus that belongs to the institution. All the ideological apparatuses are, in other words, replicating themselves; because that's .the way the culture works. So if I function as a virus, an impostor, an infiltrator, I will always replicate myself together with those institutions." Thus, the artist reacted to both the social and political issues that motivated his personal concerns and artistic activism throughout his career. The first González Torres exhibition in Mexico carries his spirit of provocation and his particular genius for an art that dares to give.
During her research for Superficies de/ deseo (Surfaces of Desire) Curator Cecilia Delgado became interested in the perception of desire within capitalist über, and the possibility of deconstructing the representations of social conventions. "There is, an ideological regulation of desire. Power codifies desire in order to govern individuals, though we may find lines of flight by which to escape the normalized territories that answer to the system's archetypal imaginary. Surfaces of desire aims to dismantle the forms of the social distribution of pleasure that have been capitalized by means of its archetypal representation. In order to do so, this exhibition explores the theme of desire in contemporary art along two axes: first, an attempt to subvert its administration through the dislocation of the representation of the body as a territory of desire in favor of bodily differentials; and second, desire as a pure affirmation of flow without representation, which produces only discharges of fields of pure affectivity and intensity."
The project includes works both from the MUAC Collections and loans from a number of sources. The artists are: María Astorga, Georgina Bringas, Dorothy Cross, Rineke Dijkstra, Marfa Ezcurra, Angus Fairhurst, Anthony Goicolea, Gabriela Gutiérrez, Gary Hill, Graciela Iturbide, Sarah Lucas, Juan Pablo Mad as, Cesar Martf nez, Ana Mendieta, Erick Meyenberg, Gabriel de la Mora, Christian Siekmeier, Valeska Soares, Soffa Taboas, Wolfgang Tillmans, Franz West and Beatriz Zamora.
We wish to express our gratitude to all the Collections and individual lenders to the exhibitions.