THE IMPOSSIBLE ORDER OF THE WORLD AT FUNDACIÓN PROA

Fundación Proa presents The Impossible Order of the World. Contemporary Art, an exhibition curated by Francisco Lemus that brings together 26 artists of great vitality within the contemporary art scene. The exhibition departs from a paradox that runs through our time: the intuition that any attempt to order the world is always partial, fragile, or momentary.

Images, objects, and experiences today seem to defy any stable structure, as if they moved within a territory where multiplicity and incompletion are the norm. This dissonance—rather than a problem—becomes here an opportunity to approach the contemporary from its own instability.

The exhibition is not organized around fixed categories, but around affinities that open up and dissolve, functioning as chapters that invite new ways of thinking about time, memory, the everyday, and the meaning of materials. Instead of a linear path, visitors encounter a permeable sequence, rich in ideas and sensations that are activated as the works establish unexpected connections.

Each gallery proposes a thematic axis without limiting possible interpretations. The first brings together works by Martín Legón and Valeska Soares, focused on time and the archive. Rivane Neuenschwander’s installation transforms the second gallery into an urban landscape, a kind of condensed city. In dialogue with it, works by Amalia Pica, Elena Dahn, and Juane configure a landscape of the everyday, of small acts and signs that traverse daily life.

The Theater of Disappearance was a monumental project created for the rooftop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017. There, Adrián Villar Rojas worked with the museum’s collections—from Egyptian and Greek art to contemporary objects—to produce hybrid sculptures, mixing bodies, fragments, utensils, and elements from different periods and cultures. Acquired by the Balanz Collection, the ensemble is presented in its entirety for the first time in an exhibition space.

In the final gallery, Diego Bianchi assumes the role of curator and exhibition designer. This decision stems from an interest in bringing into dialogue two ways of seeing: that of the curator, who organizes relationships and proposes an interpretive framework, and that of the artist, who introduces a different sensitivity capable of reorganizing the space through the logic of the studio.

That these works can unfold in all their complexity is also the result of the boldness of private collections, which take on the risk of supporting a process that is central to artistic practice: imagining other ways of seeing. Collecting acts as a bridge that allows works to circulate, be activated, and find new forms of resonance in the eyes of the public.

The Impossible Order of the World is an exhibition in which the works do not illustrate a concept nor respond to a single reading, but instead open up connections that each visitor can construct in their own way. In this movement emerges a way of thinking about the present—not as a closed system, but as a territory in constant interrogation.

The show can be visited through March at Fundación PROA, Av. Pedro de Mendoza 1929, La Boca, Caminito, Buenos Aires (Argentina).