APOPHENIA

Since the most remote times, human beings have been passionate about collecting — or, as we say today, assembling collections; guided by curiosity, we exercise the mind to establish the most varied, unusual, and complex connections, which have allowed us to resolve countless unknowns and face every kind of challenge.

APOPHENIA

Joining Through Meaning

Since the most remote times, human beings have been passionate about collecting — or, as we say today, assembling collections; guided by curiosity, we exercise the mind to establish the most varied, unusual, and complex connections, which have allowed us to resolve countless unknowns and face every kind of challenge.

It is precisely this connection between curiosity and collecting that we draw on today to propose a series of possible connections between the works that, throughout the history of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Bogotá, have shaped its holdings.

The Greek term Apophenia derived from the word Apo, "to separate, to move away," and Phaínein, "to appear, to manifest as phenomenon," describes the experience of perceiving patterns, connections, or both, randomly or in apparently meaningless data. This has been the initial motive for the curatorial project with which we begin a series of exhibitions that will culminate with our museum's 60th founding anniversary in 2026.

It is true that our collection begins with the very expressions of our country's entry into modernity in the late 1950s and 1960s, a period of great global change marked by the Cold War between the two major powers, the rise of the libertarian movements of May '68, insurgent groups in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, the space race, scientific and technological advances, and social, cultural, and economic transformations and inequalities.

Followed by the turbulent decades of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, which, in Colombia's case, marked the end of the political power-sharing proposed by the Frente Nacional, the

imposition of the Security Statute, the boom in drug trafficking with its consequent wave of corruption, the financing of armed groups outside the law, both insurgent and paramilitary, leading up to the horrible night plagued by assassinations, attacks, kidnappings, hired killings, massacres, and deep pain.

The system of thought proposed from art does not focus on solutions but rather on deepening the causes, processes, and consequences; in this way it is an open equation whose components can interact to produce different results, each valid depending on the context of whoever formulates it, or whoever appropriates it; it is not exclusionary, dogmatic, or dominant — rather, it is adaptable, fluid, and ever-changing.

For these reasons we invite you to, based on the works displayed in this curatorial project, generate those connections that will give multiple meanings to what we live, what we are, or what we wish for; do not limit yourselves to the merely narrative, descriptive, or literal plane — dare to take the connections to another level, weaving personal, social, oneiric, subversive, symbolic, political, poetic, aesthetic, symbiotic ideas… the greater the number of connections, the more holistic, relevant, and solid the meaning you will obtain.

The ingredients are served; the moment and the opportunity are now. The capacity for aesthetic reflection belongs to every social being, consistent with the reality in which they live. We reaffirm the social meaning of culture that transcends geographic, political, or ideological borders.

Gustavo A. Ortiz S.
Director of the MAC

 Artists in the Collection

María del Pilar Cuellar