‘A crossroads of collections’

TRI-CONTINENTAL ART to celebrate CAAM’s 25th anniversary

When it opened on 4 December 1989, CAAM (Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno) became the third contemporary art museum and centre in Spain. Strongly conditioned by its strategic geographic location in the middle of the ocean, over this quarter of a century the CAAM has consolidated its reputation as a benchmark cultural institution in the Canary Islands.

With the theoretical backing of the prestigious journal Atlántica. Revista de Arte y Pensamiento, the founding concept of tri-continentality championed by Martín Chirino which differentiates the CAAM from other art centres around the world, has also helped to weave a series of cultural networks on either side of the Atlantic, bringing together what had once been mutually distant and different.

It is almost surprising that after barely two decades, an abstract concept such as tri-continentality proved capable of uniting art created in Africa, the closest continent to the Canary Islands geographically, in Europe, the territory to which we belong, and in America, the horizon towards which our culture expands, with infinite round-trip journeys.

The current exhibition has been organised to celebrate CAAM’s 25th anniversary, and proposes a dialogue between our collection and the collections of other leading public and private art centres, to whom we are extremely grateful for their close collaboration over these many years.

In addition, it has been preceded by other exhibitions in which we showcased the broad aesthetic spectrum of our holdings: Reinventar la Isla I and II, exploring art from the Canary Islands; Bipolar and Carnaza para los dioses, looking at works in photography and video-art; Los últimos serán los primeros, also on video-art; Espacio contenido, featuring a selection of installations; Revelaciones, presenting a set of art objects, and Cuadernos de Bitácora 1, based on works on paper.

But unlike previous projects, the one we are now introducing is conceived to relocate this museum from Gran Canaria within the global contemporary discourse, as a space from where a tri-continental echo emanates, creating an ongoing rapprochement with what is happening in art from Africa, Europe and America.

Cruce de colecciones fosters a ‘conversation’ between private and public collections in our surrounding area of influence in order to define our new and changing reality, in this way opening up a new path for the museographic reinterpretation of the CAAM’s holdings.

At the same time, it also wishes to be a homage from Gran Canaria to all those who have supported our ultra-peripheral singularity, and to the Atlantic and exceptional character that deserves to be commemorated.

Larry Álvarez
President of CAAM
General Coordinator of Culture, Historic Heritage and Museums, Cabildo de Gran Canaria

IMAGE GALLERIES

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