INDOC. Documentation centre about Art and Nature

Contemporary art, photography and science come together in El mundo descrito

The exhibition, curated by Pablo Llorca, includes famous photographs widely disseminated in the international press (the latest portraits of Michael Jackson and images of the robbery of the Munch Museum in Oslo); scientific tools (a film analysis of a race held in 1886); photographs used to focus attention on major issues (shots taken by Greenpeace that provide evidence of the melting of glaciers); archive material (an anthropological portrait of the black population of Guadalupe in the last century); research tools (a shot of an asteroid echinoderm), and much more.

Whatever their aesthetic status, these works have shaped the way we see the world. This repertoire of icons reflects a desire to document and narrate as well as an aesthetic impulse. El mundo descrito raises a specific question about these works and how they are defined: are they simply documents or also works of art?

The exhibition also opens up a debate about the distance between contemporary art and knowledge, a gap which some claim has broken the link between art and knowledge that has always existed to one extent or another in Western culture.

The images presented show the enormous potential of photography as a scientific tool, and underscore how photography can forge concrete links between science and contemporary art. The exhibition considers the cultural and aesthetic relevance of visual documents that are not generally regarded as works of art.

In the exhibition, historic images coexist with recent, widely disseminated photographs that tend to be consumed without any conscious reflection on their implications: images of the tsunami catastrophe, the eruption of a volcano, fauna and flora, as well as ultrasound scans and x-rays, portraits, legal and police documents, etc.

Some of the photographs – though not the majority – are the work of professional artists. These works contribute to describing the world and raise the question of whether they are to be interpreted as images created by a particular author or descriptive images.

More information

El mundo descrito, 7 February to 4 May 2008

Museo Colecciones ICO

C/ Zorrilla, 3
Madrid

Tel.: +34 91 420 12 42

Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m.; Sundays and public holidays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Information and reservations for children's workshop-visits:
Tel.: +34 91 323 28 72 and +34 655 19 92 23

Web site for the exhibition (Fundación ICO web site)

Source: texts – CDAN based on information provided by Fundación ICO; photographs provided for this newsletter by Fundación ICO

Upper photograph: Michael Jackson, 2005, digital reproduction, Agencia EFE, © EFE/POOL/EPA/Justin Sullivan.

Lower photograph: Photographie zoologique, ou représentation des animaux rares des collections du Musée d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, Fósiles marinos, s. f.L. Rousseau and A. Devéria,  digital reproduction, approx. 29 x 42 cm, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Bibliothèque centrale, Paris, © Bibliothèque centrale du Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, 2007.

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