Programa C and the impulse to young art in the country
- Tatyana Zambrano, artista."Programa C is important to me because it was my first solo exhibition and the first experience of working with a curator and in an institutional context. It gave me visibility and confidence to move forward with my projects and keep working on concepts that I still explore. Over time, I saw that Programa C expanded to other cities and that artists and colleagues I admire participated, and that also gave me support and encouragement to keep working."
Interaction with artists from new generations has been vital to the Museum’s history. Between 1981 and 2003, one of the most important programs for us was the Arturo and Rebeca Rabinovich Salon, which contributed to discovering and encouraging artists under 30 from different regions of the country.
Since 2014, we have been working in coordination with Celsia, the energy company of Grupo Argos, to promote exhibition spaces for emerging Colombian creators and curators. This proposal, called Programa C, is a segment of our programming that recognizes the value of experiences in young art and offers artists the opportunity to participate in a recognized space within the art ecosystem, thus complementing and boosting their professional career. To date, 17 projects by artists from cities such as Medellin, Bogota, Ciudad Bolivar, Cali, and Pasto have been presented, accompanied by independent curators from Colombia, Ecuador, and France.
Each proposal carried out within Programa C has involved the accompaniment of a guest curator, a period of research and production in which the artist has a work fund sponsored by Celsia, and the Museum’s support in the implementation and gallery installation of the final result. The following artists have participated in this program: Tatyana Zambrano, Victor Garces, Gabriel Botero, Henry Palacios & Roman Navas, Angelica Teuta, Laura Huertas, Juan David Henao, Jorge Marin, Lorena Espitia, La Decanatura (Elkin Calderon and Diego Pineros), Sandra Rengifo, Juan Caicedo, Pablo Mora, Sebastian Munera, David Escobar Parra, Johan Samboni, and currently Roberto Ochoa.
For the Museum, “Programa C is an invaluable opportunity to promote and recognize the value of experiences in young art, to offer emerging artists the opportunity to participate in a recognized artistic space, and thus complement and boost their professional career,” according to director Maria Mercedes Gonzalez, who also noted that thanks to the good results obtained in the local experience, Celsia replicated this program at the Museo La Tertulia in Cali in 2016.
Some of the themes explored by participating Programa C artists include memory and forgetting in abandoned spaces; the aesthetics and logics that interrogate the concepts of housing and urban development; the relationship between cinema and ethnography, colonialism, and anthropology; the importance of ceramics and corn in Latin American cosmologies; fiction and the unofficial accounts of the “discovery” of America; and the idea of progress and precariousness in the history of aviation in Colombia, among others.
A proposal like Programa C allows the Museum to recognize current dynamics and practices, generating an update of art’s relationship with other topics and with new ways of making, in order to provide a space for the dissemination and enjoyment of young art by the public.
Ricardo Sierra, president of Celsia, recognizes the importance of private enterprise investing in spaces that promote different artistic manifestations. In his words, “Celsia promotes art and culture as channels of expression for society. It is interesting for artists because through this platform we are allowing new talents to become known. Programa C opens the opportunity for emerging Colombian artists and curators from different parts of the world, in addition to recognizing the value of young art. For them, it is a dream to exhibit their work in a recognized space and to have a springboard for their professional career. We know it is not easy to get a work into a museum, and with this partnership we are telling these young people that it is possible.”
In 2021, we held a national call for proposals from emerging curators who were working on an artistic project alongside young artists, as a way to stimulate local artistic production after a challenging situation such as the pandemic caused by Covid-19. On that occasion, we received about 100 proposals from different regions of the country, from which three proposals were selected for the 2022 and 2023 editions of Programa C. One of the selected projects is currently on display in the Museum’s galleries.
The most recent Programa C project is Roberto Ochoa. Caliban, an exhibition curated by Jorge Lopera that is conceived as a playful installation mixing sculptural furniture and videos created from the recombination of symbols of modern Antioquia. This exhibition harnesses the power of the image of Caliban, a character from A Tempest — the adaptation for a Black theater that Caribbean thinker Aime Cesaire made of the play of the same name written by William Shakespeare — in which the “savage” rebels to challenge history and identity, in order to question the imaginaries inherited in Antioquia after the process that, mainly between the 19th and 20th centuries, was known as “Antioquian colonization.” This exhibition will be in the galleries until April 9, 2023.