The exhibition La Menesunda According to Marta Minujín at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid reconstructs one of her most essential works, today considered a pioneering achievement in the history of immersive installations from the second half of the twentieth century.
Created in 1965 by Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín for the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella’s Centro de Artes Visuales in Buenos Aires, in a context of tremendous conceptual experimentation and profound cultural transformations in Argentina, La Menesunda radically changed the relationship between work and viewer. Conceived by Minujín and Santantonín as an ephemeral “environment,” the work replaced contemplation with multisensory experience, turning the space of the exhibition into a site for active participation. The version presented by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is the result of research that began in 2015 at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires to recreate this work on the basis of photographs, film recordings, and other materials, in close collaboration with the artist herself. Having been shown in Buenos Aires and then at the New Museum in New York and at the Copenhagen Contemporary, this reconstruction is appearing for the first time in Spain.
The exhibition of La Menesunda at the Museo Reina Sofía is paired with a documentary journey through the happenings, performances, and participatory actions that Marta Minujín developed between 1963 and 1985. Through photographs, drawings, and a range of archival materials, the exhibition provides a thorough overview of the intense experimental process that defined more than two decades of artistic commitment.
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