FROM MINUJÍN TO DE ANDRADE: A LUDIC INTERACTION WITH THE MNAD COLLECTION
Let’s Play. Juguemos en la colección, a BIENALSUR project, engages with the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas through the conceptual lens of play, featuring the work of ten artists, mostly from Latin America, including Marta Minujín, Glenda León, and Silvia Rivas.
The National Museum of Decorative Arts (MNAD) in Madrid presents Let’s Play. Juguemos en la colección, a project integrated into BIENALSUR’s programming, consisting of a series of interventions and interferences by ten artists’ works, distributed throughout the museum’s permanent collection spaces. Curated by Argentine curator Diana Wechsler, the project invites viewers to observe historical objects from the perspective of contemporary art.
Of the ten selected artists, seven are either from Latin America or have maintained a close relationship with the Latin American sphere. All of them explore the critical strategy underlying the concept of play and encourage, through the selected works, the exploration of perception and the promotion of interaction, expanding the boundaries traditionally imposed on sculpture, image, object, and aesthetics.
-
Lets Play. Marta Minujín. Inventarteartearte!!!! Cortesía de MNAD
The entrance hallway hosts CerebrarteArteArte!!!! by Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1943), transforming it into a starting point for reconsidering art as a playful and sensory experience. The piece, created especially for this project, recalls in some ways the aesthetic and intention of La Menesunda, turning the space into an immersive experience.
In Lenguaje pictórico, Glenda León (Havana, Cuba, 1976) intervenes on a typewriter to create a distance between writing methods across time, employing humor and irony. Silvia Rivas (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1957), one of the pioneering figures of expanded video in Latin America, investigates in La niña the return to childhood and suspended time as a creative space through playful gestures as hypnotic actions.
-
Glenda León. Lenguaje pictórico. Cortesía de Estudio Glenda León
Aimée Zito Lema (Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1982), raised in Buenos Aires, works on the concept of personal and social memory across different disciplines, as in ¿Puedes oír los corazones latiendo al unísono?, a video addressing childhood and learning as a thesis on memory. Meanwhile, Sebastián Gordin (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1969) reproduces miniatures and game pieces that invite viewers to imagine alternative stories and rules.
Finally, the practices of Marcelino Melo (Carneiros, Brazil, 1994) and Jonathas de Andrade (Maceió, Brazil, 1982) bring play into narrative through collective and ritual dimensions. Melo approaches Brazilian urban peripheries as spaces of resistance and potential identity, advocating for the playful side of politics. In O Peixe, De Andrade presents a ritual exploring the cultural relationship between body and nature.
Let’s Play. Juguemos en la colección can be seen until March 8 at the National Museum of Decorative Arts, Montalbán 12, Madrid, Spain.
Related Topics
May interest you
DONNA HUANCA INTERVENES IN THE CAAC WITH HER SENSORIAL LANGUAGE
By Álvaro de Benito
The installation is constructed using the artist's usual practices, where sand, pigments, and translucent curtains come together with cosmology and contemporary languages.
ANDREA CANEPA: THE PALACIO DE CRISTAL AS A SYMBOLIC BODY
By Álvaro de Benito
Andrea Canepa intervenes in the Palacio de Cristal at the Museo Reina Sofía with Fardo, an installation consisting of a large tarp inspired by pre-Columbian funerary bundles that transforms the building into a symbolic body, inviting reflection on what is visible and displayed, as well as on preservation and transformation.
ROBERTO HUARCAYA’S PHOTOGRAMS AT MARCO VIGO
By Álvaro de Benito
The exhibition brings together a decade of technical and poetic experimentation that transcends the traditional boundaries of photography and places visual experience at the center of reflection.
GINA ARIZPE AND THE INVISIBILIZED AT MEIAC
By Álvaro de Benito
The exhibition traces different moments and formal strategies in her practice, marked by a critical reflection on violence, denial, and the tensions that permeate the female experience in contemporary society.
LATIN AMERICAN ARTISTS IN SPAIN: NEW NOTES FROM AN ONGOING RESEARCH
By Mónica Sotos
What are the successive diasporas of Latin American artists to Spain about, from the final years prior to the turn of the twenty-first century to the present? Article 2 of a series of 3.
WHEN A RENAISSANCE PAINTER OUTDRAWS CONTEMPORARY ART
The current exhibition devoted to Beato Angelico at Palazzo Strozzi is not only an art-historical event but also a revealing case study in how audiences engage with art today. It is the first major exhibition dedicated to the artist in more than seventy years (last time was in 1955) , and its success goes well beyond scholarly importance.
WEAVING THE INVISIBLE: MORENO AND ENRÍQUEZ IN DIALOGUE AT LA TERCERA NAVE
La Tercera Nave brings together the practices of Linarejos Moreno and Vanessa Enríquez in a dialogue centered on the material and symbolic remnants of memory. Through the concepts of textiles and weaving, both artists address fragmentation from industrial and technological perspectives.
LINETT, ZEVALLOS VILLEGAS AND SARAVIA: LATIN AMERICAN PRESENCE IN VISIÓN Y PRESENCIA 2026
The three artists will bring their unique Latin American perspectives to reflect on the global themes addressed by the cycle: feminism, historical memory and power relations.
