MALBA PRESENTS AN EXHIBITION ON SPIRITUALITY

Curated by Lara Marmor, the exhibition is an exploration of artistic practice in the new millennium, a moment in which, in an eclectic and sometimes contradictory plot, ancient Eastern and Amerindian cosmovisions, meditation, holistic therapies, esotericism, homeopathy, neo-shamanism, astrology and Buddhism coexist.

Most of the participating artists were born between the late seventies and the eighties, and entered the art scene in the 2000s. They were marked by the economic, social and political circumstanses of the Alfonsinist spring, the convertibility crisis and the economic, social and political explosion of 2001, which became the key to read what was happening in the field of art in those years. They are the ones who receive the legacy of Tao del Arte, the exhibition curated by Jorge Gumier Maier at the Recoleta Cultural Center in 1997. There, in the curatorial text, between Osho and the Tao of physics by Fritjof Capra, the aesthetic paradigm of those years was condensed. They are also the young people who are fully going through the times of a type of spirituality that in its beginnings was presented as an alternative.

For several years now, bioenergetics and coaching have been cornering psychoanalysis, tofu is gaining ground over steak and yoga is competing with localized gymnastics. In the bestseller lists, self-help books share space with encyclopedias on mushrooms and the most sophisticated astrological guides. Shamans, gurus and social science researchers urge us to recognize and pay homage to Gaia and Pachamama. How does the superimposition of beliefs, practices and knowledge, often ancestral, that make up that elusive thing we could call contemporary spirituality, impact and constitute us?

In the words of curator Lara Marmor: "The incorporation of habits crossed by discourses that celebrate self-awareness, healthy living and positivity enables a freer experience of desire and pleasure, at the antipodes of the weight of guilt, sin and sacrifice in traditional Western religions. Personal and social transformation, an issue that pivots between neoliberal individualism and the communitarian associationism of the various activisms, takes on an unusual presence (...) Open to experimentation, these works break the binomials: man/nature, rationality/spirituality, mind/body, and from humor, irony or the deepest spiritual search realize that energy and transforming force are fundamental, today and here, in these moments of change."

Participating artists: Diego Bianchi, Paula Castro, Laura Códega, Roberta Di Paolo, Nicolás Domínguez Nacif, Bruno Dubner, Carlos Herrera, Daniel Leber, Martín Legón, Nicolás Mastraccio, Eduardo Navarro, Gastón Pérsico, Belén Romero Gunset, Marisa Rubio, Lucía Reissig, Mariana Telleria, Ana Vogelfang, Ana Won.