Where is Our Place?

The Where is Our Place? exhibition grew out of an interest in striking up a dialogue, in forging a connection and affinity between the collections of IVAM and of MAXXI, Rome. With this goal in mind, we have brought together a group of works from the collection of the Italian museum (Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Francis Alys, Jana Sterbak, Mario Merz, Alfredo Jaar, Kara Walker, William Kentridge, Atelier Van Lieshout and Teddy Cruz) with some major works from the IVAM collection (Bruce Nauman, Gabriele Basilico and Richard Hamilton). Their common ground is a concern with the inhabited and social space, a questioning of the city, the home, the community, or the personal sanctuary.

The exhibition seeks to understand how spaces mark time and are linked to a place’s memory. We present a group of works and large installations that seem to be an accumulation of places with varying degrees of closeness and disconnectedness, and which draw attention to the fragmentation of the human experience, to the inability to comprehend the social whole and to the imperfection of knowledge.

In addition, Where is Our Place? wishes to talk about those people who feel like strangers no matter where they are, as they come to feel that their existence unfolds, somewhat anxiously, in cities that they no longer recognize and in urban spaces in which they have no place or space. And so, in the exhibition we find a group of ideas and projects that understand architecture as a structure that condenses a physical world; as the desire to build a place (a haven, a sanctuary, a house, a home…) defined by the people that use it, as if it were a (more or less free) version of ourselves.