CABELLO/CARCELLER. Draft for an Untitled Exhibition

Starting May 27, the first floor of the MARCO will feature the project by CABELLO/CARCELLER Borrador para una exposición sin título (Draft for an Untitled Exhibition), produced jointly with the CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo of Móstoles, Spain, and curated by Manuel Segade. This exhibition is a retrospective reviewing the works of artists for over two decades.

Since 1992, Cabello/Carceller (Paris, 1963/Madrid, 1964) have developed a common artistic project focused on the criticism of hegemonic visual culture. As tools of feminist theory, and queer de-colonial theory, they have made use of visual and cultural studies in order to produce over the years a body of work which questions the neoliberal model of social production. Through interdisciplinary practices, they offer alternatives to conventional stories about minority politics, including the debate on the role of contemporary artistic production among them. A methodology based on mutual collaboration and on the incorporation of external actors and agents has allowed them to represent displacements and disarrangements which reveal resistances and divergences against established values.

Following their participation at the Spanish Pavilion at the last edition of the Venice Biennale, the retrospective exhibition here allows us to revisit their career, and to place the latest proposals within a context starting with the late 80’s Culture Wars during their formative period until the latest social revolts against the return of neoliberal order.

According to Cabello/Carceller’s working logic, the exhibition is conceived as an infiltration that contaminates the institution, using a form of discourse which normally remains hidden. Exhibition spaces overlap different moments in their career in order to restore a temporal complexity beyond the idea of lineal progression. Works speak to one another in a chrono-political way in which the earliest works can be read as comments or references to build the meaning of the latest ones.

As a kind of interplay all throughout the exhibition, older and shorter works act to a certain extent as prompts or footnotes for other works, but mainly as a way to shorten distances and to go deeper into the concept of the retrospective not as an evolution or progress, but as a continued and intermittent process.