Guggenheim Bilbao

Cai Guo-Qiang:

I Want to Believe

03.17.09 > 09.20.09

• Español
• Euskera
• English
• Français

• About the artist
• Bibliography
• The exhibition
  • Exhibition in Bilbao
  • Gunpowder drawings
  • Explosion events
  • Installations
  • Everything is museum
  • Interview with the curator
• Create Your Own Museum
• Audiovisual gallery
• Installation in the Atrium
• Video-tour through the exhibition
• Educational activities
• Online store
• Purchase tickets
• E-cards

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Sponsored by:

• Museum Website
• Legal information
• © Museo Guggenheim Bilbao 2009

The ExhibitionEverything is Museum

The social utopianism that pervades Cai Guo-Qiang´s artistic strategies has led to the use of the term “social projects” to describe a range of work for which collaboration with communities and other artists are key to the artist’s process, methodology, imagination, and narrative. In 2000, Cai inaugurated his Everything is Museum, series of site-specific, communitybased MoCAs (museums of contemporary art) that appropriate non-art structures, such as military bunkers and old kilns, for the exhibition of contemporary art. These MoCAs attest to the artist’s interest in unstable environments. To date, Cai has realized three MoCAs at offbeat sites in Japan, Italy, and the Kinmen island in Taiwan; a fourth MoCA located in China is forthcoming.

As the founder, director, and curator of the Everything is Museum projects, which encompass the MoCAs and the exhibitions presented at them, Cai demonstrates his commitment to the democratic empowerment of art and to reinventing the role of the artist in society. The MoCAs involve extraordinary logistical negotiations that rely on Cai’s considerable charisma and mobilization skills, including fund-raising, and expand on his goal not just to make art but to, as he says, “create a culture.”

UMoCA: Everything is Museum No.2, 2001

Permanent museum created in 2001 under St. Francis bridge, Colle di Val d’Elsa, Tuscany

In conjunction with Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe, the Guggenheim Museum has invited Cai to curate this Everything is Museum exhibition. The presentation includes documentation and contributions by Norman Foster, Jennifer Wen Ma, Kiki Smith, and Tan Dun, all of whom have participated in the Everything is Museum. Ma’s installation has been specially designed for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The exhibition also presents designs that have been developed by Thomas Krens, former director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, for Guggenheim museums worldwide. Central to Cai’s work in any new city is his interest in engaging the local history and society to create a temporal, site-specific, and interactive work.

—Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.

Pause, 2003

Kiki Smith

I began the open-ended, long-term series Everything is Museum in 2000. Initially, I was motivated by the desire to engage with the cities and places that have hosted my projects in amore direct and lasting way. The global scope of this endeavor reflects my own personal experiences as an artist and has also been, in part, a response to the Guggenheim’s strategy to create an international network of museums.

At present, there are three permanent museums operating as part of the series: DMoCA (Dragon Museum of Contemporary Art), UMoCA (Under Museum of Contemporary Art), and BMoCA (Bunker Museum of Contemporary Art). A future addition to this series will be QMoCA (Quanzhou Museum of Contemporary Art), which will be built in my hometown in China.

The first four museums represent a minor rebellion against the current museum system that sets the international standard. Everything is Museum challenges the participating artists to produce meaningful pieces in alternate spaces with very limited, essential conditions. While a designated exhibition space has been provided, there are no basic utilities such as water or electricity, and technical components such as security and climate control have been disregarded altogether. What is most fascinating to me is that the artists were, in all instances, able to realize their ambitious ideas despite the extreme limitations imposed on them and that audiences enjoyed their experience.

Conventional museum roles are also affected. The artist becomes the director or the curator and in turn invites other artists, curators, directors, and/or communities to create artworks for an exhibition, thereby contesting power structures and requiring constant negotiations among active players.

I have curated this exhibition as an open invitation to question the current museum system, to blur the apparent lines between prescribed roles and disciplines, and to expand our acceptance and openness toward previously inconceivable places for art making and appreciation.

—Cai Guo-Qiang