Viceversa is the exhibition that culminates the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the Bogota Museum of Modern Art and will be dedicated to the Museum's Collection. This exhibition is the result of an in-depth analysis and contemporary review of the Collection. In this sense, Viceversa suggests alternative interpretations that challenge the conventional visual narratives adopting a “reverse” approach while proposing connections, visual counterpoints, and unusual concepts.
Viceversa, unlike traditional exhibitions, is not based on a specific theme, group, or historical period. On the contrary, it presents more than 400 works by artists from different generations that will be exhibited throughout the 4 floors of the Museum as a symphony that lies under the axes of: Memory, Identity and Dissonances.
"Memory" examines the social and cultural basis of the Collection, highlighting thematic concerns that recur the different genres and periods, making the analysis of the past into a critical tool to address the present. The "Identity" section explores the uniqueness of the Museum's Collection, rooted in its diversity and connected to its social and cultural context, which has influenced its history and development. Finally, "Dissonances'' introduces alternative perspectives and interpretations that explore social issues like race, gender, identity, and political crisis, challenging the dominant cultural narratives by offering a cross-cultural critique through works that pose counterpoints, rhetorical questions, and revisionist statements. In this way, the exhibition frames the Museum as a living organism, full of symbolic relationships, stories to be told and possibilities to be shaped.
According to MAMBO’s chief curator Eugenio Viola: "Viceversa showcases a collection of works that move away from the traditional conventions of art history as we know it, instead, it intentionally links diverse stories. It adheres to a non-systematic and anarchic proportion: the Museum's Collection is presented as an open process that seeks a critical rewriting and proposes a way of exhibiting itself as a diversity of experiences, functioning as a laboratory of imaginative research and production."
In addition, the exhibition features three site-specific projects by artists of different geographies and concerns that offer new perspectives on the Museum's history, mission, and agency: Genealogy of a Collection by Argentine Adriana Bustos; Greetings from Bogota by Italian Giuseppe Stampone; and Museums Also Cry (And a Lot) by Colombian Juan Uribe.
Viceversa is a visual experience that goes beyond the past and the present, the local and the international, it presents a constellation of art works that connect with a wide range of narratives. Acknowledging the history and legacy of the Museum, the exhibition seeks to challenge the narrative conventions of art history, while presenting the collection as a process open to joint and contextualized critical rewriting that opens the possibility for a multiplicity of experiences, investigations, and imaginative productions as part of the constant construction of modern and contemporary art.
