An Uncertain Pleasure: Time-Based Works from the Pierre Huber Collection

Artists: Kutlug Ataman, Kader Attia, Alberto Baraya, Robert Barry, Manon de Boer, Candice Breitz, Shaoxiong Chen, Mat Collishaw, David Claerbout, Fischli & Weiss, Sylvie Fleury, Mario García Torres, Cyprien Gaillard, Rodney Graham, Dexin Gu, Isaac Julien, On Kawara, William Kentridge, Kimsooja, Liuming Ma, Paul McCarthy, Tracey Moffatt, Mariko Mori, Tony Oursler, Yoshua Okón, Nam June Paik, Paul Pfeiffer, Tino Sehgal, Roman Signer, Elaine Sturtevant, Catherine Sullivan, Gian Maria Tosatti, Peili Zhang, Francesco Vezzoli, Franz West.

The exhibition’s title, An Uncertain Pleasure, borrowed from the homonymous seminal work by Zhang Peili —a pioneer of video art in China— pays homage to the multifaceted cultural, geographical, and globalized perspectives addressed in Huber’s collection.

An Uncertain Pleasure is divided in 4 thematic sections, one for each level of the building, underlining some of the main subjects that manifest across the collection: socio-political questions, identity politics, the representation and fragmentation of the body, performativity and performance, globalization and diaspora.

Highlights of the exhibition include many works produced between the 1990s and 2000s by groundbreaking artists from North America and Europe, such as Fischli & Weiss, Catherine Sullivan, Francesco Vezzoli, Rodney Graham, Paul Pfeiffer, Isaac Julien or Tino Sehgal; but also from Asia, Central and South America, Africa and the Pacific, including William Kentridge, Kimsooja, Shirin Neshat, Candice Breitz, Manon De Boer, Tracey Moffatt, and Mariko Mori, as a testimony to the global ambition of the Collection.

The artworks are displayed as environmental audiovisual installations that adopt cinema conventions or incorporate projections, synchronized audio, or performance.
An Uncertain Pleasure proposes various approaches to time-based experiences, not only in terms of form, content, or hybridization with other disciplines and media, but also in terms of their presentation.

According to Eugenio Viola, chief curator at MAMBO, “Each year, the Museum presents a thematic focus on the phenomenon of collecting. The first of this series, and the first on collecting in Colombia, was the exhibition entitled I Wanna Be with You. Now it is the turn of the prestigious and unique Pierre Huber Collection, with many remarkable works by some of the most important artists of the last 50 years, many of whom are exhibited for the first time in Colombia and Latin America”.