Image: Galeria de Arte Las Americas, Cali
The Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín will open four new exhibitions on Thursday 10 September, bringing together projects by Astrid González, Félix Blume, Gala Porras-Kim and Pedro Gómez-Egaña. The free opening programme includes a conversation at 6:30 p.m. around exhibitions exploring relationships with matter, territory, memory and sound.
The clearest institutional milestone is Porras-Kim’s ‘El movimiento de un registro fluvial’, her first institutional exhibition in Colombia. The presentation examines how museums, archives and structures of power construct narratives around cultural objects, including the decisions that determine what is preserved and how preserved material is interpreted. The artist’s practice also considers the changing frameworks of meaning attached to historical material culture and the institutional taxonomies used to classify it.
Porras-Kim will discuss the exhibition with curator Natalia Valencia Arango at the MAMM on Friday 11 September. Their conversation will address the stories and processes behind the works, as well as the ways museums and archives build histories around objects. The event is free and forms part of the exhibition’s programme.
Sound is the subject of Félix Blume’s ‘Enjambre’, which uses 250 small speakers suspended from the ceiling to reproduce the individual sounds of bees in flight. The work begins as a homogeneous murmur evoking the collective force of a swarm; as visitors move between the speakers, the distinct sound of each bee emerges, with its erratic flight, breathing and intimate presence.
The other two exhibitions extend the programme into oceanic and geological registers. In Astrid González’s ‘La boca donde el agua engendra el agua’, the ocean is described as both cemetery and site of liberation. Mermaids, serpents and Haitian Vodou entities inhabit a coded fabulation through which dreams, currents and ancestral vibrations become accessible. Pedro Gómez-Egaña’s ‘Los años de la piedra’ addresses a territory where domestic and geological space overlap, drawing on Antioquia’s sloping geography and the former industrial history of the MAMM building, once a steel plant born from coal mining. The exhibitions open in the museum’s Fundiciones, A, B, C and D rooms, LAB 3 and Teatro MAMM.
