Experiences of the World

Experience involves perception, imagination, and memory; it implies desire and relates to action, practice, and thought. It is always both individual and collective, internal and external. Each person experiences the world differently, in a state of continuous transformation. The world moves—and with it, everything that inhabits it.

A museum is also a place of experience, shaped by its architectural form, the objects it presents, and the relationships it establishes with those who inhabit and visit it. Experiences of the World brings together a selection of singular poetic “microcosms” in constant motion and transformation, challenging our senses to open in multiple directions. From restlessness to wonder, with moments of irony in between, the invited artists critically engage our imaginative capacity, putting our certainties to the test.

Here, objects are displaced from their everyday meanings, out of scale, in precarious balance, with unexpected connections, or altered in their materiality. Environments shift our perception, testing the limits between physical properties and opposing elements—light and darkness, sound and silence, emptiness and presence. Moving and still images awaken imagination and memory. Literary languages and nonlinear writing take on plastic form in space.

Ann Veronica Janssens, Belén Uriel, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Ernesto Neto, Fernando Brito, Fischli & Weiss, Gabriel Orozco, Horácio Frutuoso, Mattia Denisse, Mauro Cerqueira, Mona Hatoum, and William Kentridge shape this exhibition, which ultimately speaks of art as experience—critical, revelatory, and poetic in its way of thinking about the world.