C-32 Sucursal. La Ene en Malba
MALBA Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
La Ene en Malba is the latest edition of the Contemporáneo program dedicated to current art from the country and the region. This
exhibition features La Ene, Nuevo Museo Energía de Arte Contemporáneo, a Buenos
Aires-based project geared to institutional criticism started in 2010.
For the duration of C-32 Sucursal, La Ene will move its center of operations to Malba, occupying the gallery designated for the Contemporáneo program, as well as the museum’s façade and courtyard. La Ene’s collection, which consists of sixteen pieces, and its archives will be on display. A series of workshops, interventions, and residency programs organized jointly by Malba and La Ene will take place. The show will be coordinated and curated by Gala Berger, Sofía Dourron, Marina Reyes Franco, and Santiago Villanueva.
“La Ene’s collection took shape in response to the constant difficulties that museums face in relation to their collections, problems regarding issues like storage and conservation,” explains Marina Reyes Franco, one of the founders of La Ene and its current director. The museum set out to work around these obstacles and to find alternatives to traditional notions of the permanent collection and of institutional holdings.
The collection revolves around works that can be stored on a hard drive and activated anywhere. “This does not mean that the collection consists solely of digital works, but rather that it focuses on works that can be adjusted to digital format for conservation,” the curators explain.
Luis Camnitzer will present his work-text El museo es una escuela [The Museum is a School] (2011- ), a site-specific installation for museum facades that changes with each location. First exhibited in Buenos Aires at La Ene in 2013, Camnitzer’s installation will be on loan to Malba during the exhibition. The work’s complete text reads: “The museum is a school: the artist learns to communicate, the public learns to make connections.” In exchange for the loan, Malba will produce a postcard with a photograph of the museum’s intervened façade to be sent to 100 artists. El museo es una escuela forms part of Camnitzer’s ongoing work on education and his criticism of art institutions and art teaching.
