Infinite Experience

MALBA presents Infinite Experience, an exhibition of live works that incites reflection on forms of life as well as art and the museum, The works featured in an event with no precedent at a museum in Latin America consist of constructed situations, live installations, and representations and choreographies created in the first years of the 21st century.

Works by eight outstanding artists from Argentina and abroad will be featured in the exhibition: Allora & Calzadilla [Jennifer Allora (Philadelphia, 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Havana, 1971)], Diego Bianchi (Buenos Aires, 1969), Elmgreen & Dragset [Michael Elmgreen (Copenhagen, 1961) and Ingar Dragset (Trondheim, Norway, 1968)], Dora García (Valladolid, Spain, 1965), Pierre Huyghe (Paris, 1962), Roman Ondák (Žilina, Slovakia, 1966), Tino Sehgal (London, 1976; he lives in Berlin), and Judi Werthein (Buenos Aires, 1967; she lives in Miami). This is the first time most of these artists have shown their work in Argentina.

The exhibition is born of a question: Is a live museum—where the works act, speak, move about, and live eternally—possible? For Agustín Pérez Rubio, artistic director of MALBA and curator of the exhibition: “The works in Experiencia Infinita are particularly concerned with the idea of the living as work and as a component of a kind of art that ensues not only in time but also in space: experience as journey, different situations that take place one after another,” he explains.

Infinite Experience is not a historical exhibition. It does not attempt to locate the precedents of live art, which partakes of theater, action, dance, performance, set design, and literature. It was in the sixties that production of this sort—which is still hard to categorize—first took shape. “Tino Sehgal, with his ‘constructed situations,’ and Dora García, with her ‘inserts in real time,’ may well be proposing other categories within these new modes of production and reception of art—something other than performance”, states Pérez Rubio, who, in his curatorial essay, places emphasis on the need to study and valorize work of this sort.