Museum of Contemporary Art Helga de Alvear

TO WRITE ALL YOUR NAMES, curated by Lola Hinojosa, co-produced by the PalaisPopulaire of Berlin and with the cooperation of the Embassy of Spain in Germany, documents an exciting but little known chapter of contemporary art from artworks from the Helga de Alvear Collection.

The exhibition not only refers to the urgent need for visibility of women artists, but also to the very specific connection with poetry, linguistics, music and architecture that links the different generations presented in this exhibition: Elena Asins, Ángela de la Cruz, Esther Ferrer, Dora García, Cristina Iglesias, Aurèlia Muñoz, Eva Lootz, Erlea Maneros, Soledad Sevilla and Susana Solano are just some of the women artists represented in this show that we enjoy in Cáceres, from 22 June to 29 October 2023.

The title of this exhibition is inspired by Dora García´s artwork, 100 impossible works of art (2001), which consists of a list of a hundred unrealizable proposals and refers to the acceptance of failure before the impossibility of what we can never materialize. For example, “Dreaming another person dreams”, “Live another person´s life”, “Be, if only for a second, with each and every human being”. Among all these phrases “Writing all their names” allows us, in the context of an exhibition formed only by female creators, to evoke a poetic action but also of agency.

All the works selected for this exhibition belong to the Helga de Alvear Collection and their chronological framework begins in the sixties of the twentieth century, when this collection begun. Since then, the Spanish political, social and cultural reality has undergone a profound transformation, in which women, as subjects, have played a key transformative role. This reality has affected these artists, both personally and collectively, being reflected in their work and in a greater presence in exhibition spaces. However, as happens in other geographies, this is an issue that still needs to be fight for.

From a poetic perspective, writing consists of representing ideas, words, numbers or musical notes by letters or other graphic signs. Most of the artworks, besides being plastic work, suggest writing. This common thread will run through the work of a group of fourteen artists of three different generations. Whether we can link them or not to a feminist consciousness, they all propose other ways of looking and inhabiting. We understand these forms as processes of subjectivation with which to apprehend the world and build themselves within it, in dialogue with music, mathematics, philosophy, nature, the biographical or sexuality.

The choral will that surrounds this exhibition is convened to name the world in feminine, because to name is to create meaning, is to make symbolic order. To Write Down All Their Names, one by one, in the annals of what some people call history.