Museum of Contemporary Arts Conde Duque Madrid

The Museum of Contemporary Arts, inside the Conde Duque, has one of the coolest settings of all the museums I have visited so far. Transformed from a 1700s Conde Duque barracks, it immediately gives off a mystic aura or should I say, tenor. Because there is no English guide, I had to resort back to emotional and aesthetic intuitions, which turned out to be such a great practice. What are left in arts without knowing their context?

Exhibition <The distance between A and B is the same as B and A>, deals with diatribe and dilemmas, geometry vs replication, figurative vs abstract, genre vs generation, seeing vs looking, idea turns into images that turn into message, without context, destined to different interpretations.

Exhibition of Ramon Gomez de la Serna’s study is interestingly another lineage of surrealism and Dada movement, similar to the MAAT Lisbon exhibit, but different in its format, in this case, a collage of objects, writings, and visual arts in his study.

Exhibition of now and past, in the basement, is mostly multimedia, mainly video, I love the participatory performance arts. One image haunted me, just like the eerie basement of the barracks, is one person putting a mirror replacing his/her head. I thought about the decapitated war victims, the Buddhist story about saving head vs body, but also the concept of self, is in relation to others.