How to Handle With Care: a show-guide on art collecting and the relevance of exhibition spaces

A robot – a stuffed dog – following training related to the description of the works, is able to produce an analysis together with ChatGPT – its observations are ironically expelled as if the dog pooped

Handle With Care: the art collecting show-guide

Handle With Care is an act of reflection with respect to the practice of collecting that interrogates the artworks themselves, the spaces, the collector and the observer. The fifty artists involved exhibit their works from Colección SOLO creating a dialogue between the different pieces on display and the space in which they are located.

The exhibition is placed at Espacio SOLO Puerta de Alcalá, in Madrid, and will be open to the public until the end of December. The exploration of the theme of collecting goes primarily through the hybridization of the art forms present, which range from sculpture and painting to video art and artificial intelligence.

Another objective of the exhibition is to investigate the current dynamics of the art sector, placing the fragility of works and their relationship to each other and to the exhibition space at the center of the analysis.

The latter becomes an element in Handle With Care, a series of questions about the appropriateness of the site along with the conflict between more or less conventional places for exhibitions moves this debate in Colección SOLO show. Also the curatorial aspect is taken into account in the set up of the exhibition, questioning from a complete perspective the sector through a focus on art collecting.

The critique to the industry through art collecting

Handle With Care «proposes an operative fiction in which it is possible to navigate the history of the museum, question its present and imagine its future without abandoning the care and affections that, without a doubt, are the most appropriate instrument to intervene on the cracks in the institution», as can be read in the curatorial essay.

The art world investigated in Handle with Care is understood as a layered and complex system in which the creator of the work is investigated according to a more intimate conception that highlights its human diversity. Its idea related to that of the finished artistic product is joined by the lived and at the same time the behind the scenes and places that that work populates from the warehouses to the eventual exhibition space.

The latter is not always reached and attainable in the contemporary art system. The non-visible of the art world dialogues with the art of collecting through the exhibition of the work of five-four artists including Miriam Cahn, William Mackinnon, Gary Simmons, Yoshitaka Amano.

The unseen in art is not a ready-made product to be enjoyed, and through Handle with care, a glimpse of the reality of exhibitions, the curatorial aspect, and internal processes is offered to the viewer.

Becoming collectible: Handle with care starting point

The exhibition that unfolds in Espacio SOLO’s labyrinthine space presents several sections starting with Becoming collectible. The section focuses on a series of contrasts starting precisely from the human diversity expressed by the artists. Opening are precisely the work Empowerment Overload by North American artist Kajahl and Der Hirt (2000) by Neo Rauch.

If in the former the artist interprets the role of the court painter within a mythical civilization, in the latter Hirt proposes a religious icon or animist symbol, in opposition to the first work.

Another piece included in this section is New World (2019) by Vanessa Barragão, which with a series of textiles in variation proposes the discovery of territory. Likewise, having the function of unveiling the artistic system, the exhibition site reveals the mechanism and its past to the public, highlighting holes, stains, and scratches. The walls reveal and exhibit the invisible tools essential to the curatorial act.

Frozen Spaces: a reflection on the container

It is in the Frozen Spaces section that we reflect on the relationship between artworks and the space they occupy by considering their dimensions, the perspectives of their positions, and their acting on space.

Since Handle With Care is an exhibition that reflects not only on art collecting but also on art and industry, space assumes high importance in this section. The museum institution is investigated, in its essence, in possible changes, upheavals, dystopian futures.

Robbie Cornelissen, in Naked-The Great Chamber (2017) uses the design of the Palazzo Ducale in Venice to represent the grandeur and authority of the museum space. In contrast, the emptiness that inhabits the very design of the Palace depicts it emptied of life and inhabited by absence. The formality of the museum site, the institution that dictates hierarchies in display, and the rarity of inclusion versus human diversity further deepen the theme of space.

Human diversity: art collecting declination

The third factor investigated is that of art collecting through a series of variations that determine the act performed. Beginning with human diversity, different forms and types are sought, possible agents capable of interacting with and determining the act of collecting.

For example, the difference and relationship between care and storage are investigated by David Jien’s self-collection work, explained through a series of canvases. Other classical forms that can be considered traditionally close to the practice of collecting are represented by artists in the Diverse Collectors section.

A recent collaboration between Miju Lee and David Oliver, Grip Face, is told through the work Domestic Scenario #02 (2023). The result of a union between two artists from two different backgrounds and led to work together in a rural area of Mallorca. The creative process will be part of a documentary conceived as part of Handle With Care.

Further reflections include ephemeral art and the possibility of collecting live performances. With respect to the latter, Operator’s work with Human Unreadable #290 (2023) uses choreography, code, blockchain, generative art, and cryptography in an attempt to make performing arts collectible through blockchain.

Dark or fertile: Imagined stories

Art gives voice to a range of stories and brings forth through its enjoyment new and other than those imagined by artists. As well as the work, the medium for enjoying it, from the museum to the specific exhibition, becomes an essential tool for curating the pieces and their evolution in the emotional sense of the term.

Dark or Fertile: Imagined stories is the section of Handle With Care that aims to rediscover the institution’s less visible places. Jannick Deslauriers through Ladder (2013) places at the center of his work the idea of a warehouse that becomes a stand-by container for the works featured in previous exhibitions at Espacio SOLO.

In juxtaposition Eve (2019) by Yoshitaka Amano imagines a fertile place through which new worlds can be generated, but which still presents itself as unstable and dangerous. Unusual views, alternative and sometimes dystopian worlds populate the section that becomes a continuous questioning of viewpoints and the future.

An intimate gaze: focus on the Colección SOLO

Handle With Care is also a chance to reflect on oneself and, in this case, on Colección SOLO and the larger project that hosts the exhibition. Through this exhibition, the Colección SOLO reveals its intimacy through the different points that compose it, to find itself in a broader picture of the institution itself.

The relevance that is given to the intermediate steps that make the exhibition possible is clear throughout the visit to those who experience the display. Handle With Care in fact places moments such as storage or restoration at the center of the reflection, along with the production and internal work processes and making of the pieces.

Some of the experimental projects promoted by Colección SOLO are reported in the documentary installations. The desire, the press release states, is to stumble through one’s own institutional, mulling over the lived experience in order to understand where the larger project now stands and any evolutions.

Symbolic of this willingness to show the behind-the-scenes and human diversity that populates it is the installation A.I.C.C.A. (2023) that aims to highlight the work of artists, engineers, and teams engaged in production invisible to art users.

In questioning the art system, the exhibition could not leave out the issue of Artificial Intelligence and its current role in both practices and criticism. A.I.C.C.A., an acronym for Artificially Intelligent Critical Canine, is Mario Klingemann’s work developed together with a studio of robotic engineers in Madrid.

The robot, which has the form of a stuffed dog, a toy, following training related to the description of the works, is able to observe the work and produce together with ChatGPT an analysis. This critical piece is ironically ejected as if the dog were making its poops through a provocative performance with respect to a subject matter that is too much discussed.

Colección SOLO

The Colección SOLO is a collection of more than 1,000 works by international contemporary artists working in fields as diverse as painting, sculpture, video art, and artificial intelligence. The SOLO Project, of which Colección is a part, aims to promote and experiment with contemporary art from 2018.

Chiara Narciso