The choreography of mirrors and influences that keeps time with the relationship between dance and the visual arts is the testbed where DANCE? is played out. The high point of CAAM’s programme for 2021, this ambitious international exhibition is a multidisciplinary and investigative collective project curated by Gabriel Hernández, the Paris-based choreographer, visual artist and dancer from Gran Canaria. DANCE? explores not only the discourses and creative processes of dance, but also its infinite possibilities for interaction and dialogue in the museum space. The project is the largest exhibition on this theme to date in Europe and encompasses a broad selection of works by 44 artists, dancers and choreographers from the Canary Islands and various countries in Europe, Africa and America, in consonance with CAAM’s declared tri-continental vocation and the plurilinguistic, transfrontier context of current contemporary creation.
The expansive exhibition space of DANCE? at CAAM unfolds over the five floors of the museum’s main building as well as its CAAM-San Antonio Abad venue, with a disparate selection of sculptures, drawings, installations, photographs, videos and performative pieces regrouped under the one interrogation mark, posed by Gabriel Hernández, calling into question the very mechanisms of choreography as a system for artistic representation. That being said, this international expert, who has accrued a solid formation and experience in choreographic composition and organization, claims that “DANCE? did not come about exactly as a question, but more as a form of resistance opposing dance itself at every attempt to conclusively define its essence”. As such, its only possible frontier is movement—“the first act of doing is moving”, according to the artist Gordon Matta-Clark—while its future is a quest that also includes the museum and the exhibition space.
Nora Navarro
