IF THIS WERE A BEGINNING OF INFINITY: MACBA’S HOMAGE TO MARÍA TERESA HINCAPIÉ

María Teresa Hincapié: If This Were A Beginning of Infinity, in MACBA, is an initial attempt to organize the physical and intangible legacy of this artist, so vital to understanding present-day practices.

IF THIS WERE A BEGINNING OF INFINITY: MACBA’S HOMAGE TO MARÍA TERESA HINCAPIÉ

Envisaged as the beginning of a continuum of imagination and doing, the exhibition María Teresa Hincapié: If This Were A Beginning of Infinity takes shape through records of the practice of an artist who believed in the transmission of knowledge as a mechanism for living together. These records consist not only of items from the archive (photographic material, videos, original texts, postcards, letters, and clippings), but also future materials that are created in the exhibition as a result of commissions.

 

Using the potential of affection as a mechanism of connection with the late artist, the exhibition calls for collective interaction as a producer of knowledge. It therefore includes works by four guest artists: José Alejandro Restrepo (with whom Hincapié collaborated on several works), Coco Fusco, Mapa Teatro, who present a piece specially created for this show, and María José Arjona, who has created Togehter but silent, a performance in collaboration with other performers that will be happening in the gallieres and around the MACBA while the exhibition runs. These new works not only swell a vital debate on movement, they also highlight the importance of the cognitive legacy of a practice that set out to transform.

With an extensive theatrical training, and unwavering rigor and discipline, María Teresa Hincapié (Armenia, Colombia, 1954–Bogotá, 2008) combined her experience in the theatre with concerns that were visionary for her time: questioning the hyperproductivity of late capitalism, our unbalanced relationship with the planet and the lack of meaning in a society dominated by consumerism. Hincapié’s career—cut short by an illness that ended her life—laid the foundations for a solid discourse about the performative as a field of artistic creation in Colombia, and for the inclusion of themes that continue to be urgent in the repertoire of aesthetic production.

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