Objetos de deseo: Contemporary Art Interventions at Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas

Objetos de deseo is an exhibition that reveals itself as visitors explore the permanent collection on the second floor of the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas. Seven contemporary artists intervene in the space, prompting reflection on how knowledge structures and their representations are configured and questioning the relevance of alternative discursive constructions.

Objetos de deseo features interventions by seven contemporary artists within the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, specifically within a recreated 17th-century noble house setting. The exhibition's poetics are based on this collision between the museum's expository discipline and artistic intervention, serving as a starting point for reflecting on how knowledge structures and their institutional representations are formed. It questions the pertinence of developing alternative discursive constructions mediated by incongruity, artificiality, and the transmutation of official history. The artworks serve as footnotes to the permanent collection, intended to trigger new narratives and activate in the visitor the suspicion that museum-conserved objects can always broaden their cognitive registers. The exhibition aims to go beyond the museum's exhibition protocols to highlight the intentional construction inherent in any approach to history and to create a new space for reality. The participating artists, including Kristoffer Ardeña, Alberto Herrero, Ignacio Llamas, Paula Rubio Infante, Federico Sancho, José Luis Serzo, and David Trullo, employ strategies such as fabulation, deception, simulation, humor, play, and the recovery of alternative memories to re-examine museum objects and spaces, granting them new attributes that can operate as participatory instruments of understanding.