March 26–September 19, 2021
March 2021
March 26–September 19, 2021
Felix Gonzalez-Torres: The Politics of Relation situates Gonzalez-Torres’s work within the postcolonial discourse and the connected histories between Spain and the Americas, especially as these impact present-day questions around memory, authority, freedom, and national identity. A particular emphasis is placed on reading Gonzalez-Torres’s work in relation to Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean culture, not as a simple, singular biographical narrative, but rather as a way of complicating any essentialist reading of his work through any single idea, theme or identity. The show proposes various interpretations stemming from this line of investigation and also highlights the work’s formative influence on queer aesthetics.
Following the thinking of Martinican writer and philosopher Édouard Glissant, the exhibition emphasizes the idea of the necessity for opacity, rather than either total transparency or instant legibility. The conceptual openness of Gonzalez-Torres’s work parallels Glissant’s position through their shared emphasis on mutability, and through the dynamics as well as the poetics of relation, which could also encompass the politics of relation.
The exhibition is arranged in a series of four rooms focused on discrete sets of concerns found in Gonzalez-Torres’s work. These themes are interrelated across the exhibition, and unfold through the works' presence beyond the museum: together these sites constitute the five “chapters” of the overall exhibition.