LUX & MATRIX
Anonymous | Ana Álvarez-Errecalde | Austin Camilleri | Cuco Suárez | Eulàlia Valldosera | Grup de Defensa del Ter Isabel Banal | Josefa Tolrà | Juana Castro | Kyung-Jin Cho Louise Bourgeois | Niki de Saint Phalle | Núria Duran | Núria Pompeia | Pau Costa | Priscilla Monge | Santiago Sierra | Saskia Calderón | Sergio Caballero | Tania Berta Judith | Victoria Verseau
Curator: Rosa Martínez
30.09 - 30.12.2022
Opening Friday, September 30 at 7 p.m.
LUX & MATRIX is a multidisciplinary exhibition which takes the uterus as a physiological reference to the place where some living beings are conceived. As an organ, the uterus is the dark empty chamber where an embryo lives and develops to become a foetus before being born into the light. As a symbol and metaphor, the house can be understood as a uterus, as the womb which goes back to the original thoughts that emerge from the darkness that precedes any creation, the blank page of the writers, the canvas without signs of the painters, the open space for installations and artistic interventions. Mother Earth, which comprises the underground worlds, the caverns or chasms, can also be considered a womb.
Artistically, the exhibition LUX & MATRIX is proposed as an inventory of a possible imaginary museum, brings together pages consciously extracted from an endless atlas, and appears as an assembly of multiple voices and visions. Images and artworks link to each other iconographically and symbolically to reflect on life, death, pleasure and beauty, understood from different cultural, environmental, gender and social class perspectives. When we are born, we come into a world that is already constructed, we do not choose our sex, or our parents, the geopolitical context in which we live or the economic ideology that governs it. In our world, the patriarchy organises, controls, legislates, penalises. And one of the main targets of its control is women’s wombs: it is the patriarchy that establishes when a child is considered legitimate or illegitimate, when abortion is permitted and when it is not. Capitalism has even normalised surrogate mothers and turned the being growing inside them into a saleable commodity. For this reason, our reality can only be transformed through new modes of intelligibility and action, through grammars that enable us to articulate forms of critical awareness and active political participation. The exhibition discourse of LUX & MATRIX celebrates creation and life while aesthetically and ideologically questioning the meaning of bringing a world into the world, be it a living being or an artistic creation.
Rosa Martínez
Art historian and curator. First woman director of the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
* Photo: Pau Costa, Our Lady of Hope. Church of Santa Maria de Cadaqués. 1729-1788. Photo: Jordi Puig
© Austin Camilleri, Leiva, 2022. Photo: Brian Grech
