What the Eye Touches

in the MUNTREF Collection

May 8, 2025, to August 1, 2026

Curator: Diana Wechsler

 

 

Image: César Ibarra Jiménez, Holobiontes VIII, 2021

This exhibition brings together a selection of works from the MUNTREF collection, some pieces from the archive and others from the bibliographic holdings, as an invitation to discover the uniqueness of each object, medium, and materiality, their interactions, and their evocative power.

Collections, archives, and libraries are presented as an “ordered” whole intended to retain diverse times and horizons. They are repertoires that are assigned value and preserved with the certainty that they contain varied meanings and, in their combination, contribute to the development of numerous narratives, perhaps as many as those of the subjects who come to investigate them.

The curatorial action establishes questions, reads, studies, selects what and why to exhibit certain pieces, rehearses dialogues between them that will contribute to the construction of the narrative, one among many possible ones.

We know from Walter Benjamin that every image has more past and future than the subject who looks at it. In collections, we encounter the visible from other eras, and this accompanies us. In the words of John Berger, this makes us feel less alone in the face of what we ourselves see appearing and disappearing every day.

Viewing the MUNTREF collection opens up perspectives that go beyond even the objects being contemplated, including the infinite forms that the past can take and the countless voices and stories that they can awaken. This affirmation of the visible refers to the illusion of an infinite repertoire, waiting for a gaze that touches them—always singular and subjective—to come to life and begin to speak with their own voice in the language of the other.

Diana Wechsler