The Hauser & Wirth art center, opened in 2021, receives 70,000 visitors each year and has already counted more than 330,000 in its first five seasons. During all this time, more than 500 events and group visits have also been organized, and 22,000 students from 439 different educational institutions have passed through.“Teachers are the first to come every season,” says the director of Hauser & Wirth in Menorca, Mar Rescalvo, for whom “it is important that most of the activities we do are designed for the local public. It is true that throughout the season we receive visitors of all nationalities and ages, experts in art, culture, and gastronomy, but many people also come to read a book, visit the old hospital and the exhibition, or eat at the restaurant, which is very successful.”Special season tickets prepared by Hauser to attract “the community closest to the project” help with this. For only 25 euros, you can travel to and from the island of Rei as many times as you want between April and October, and all the activities held there are free. The four daily school visits, the weekly family workshops, movement and writing workshops, music concerts, and storytelling sessions, she says, “are a clear indicator that the people of Menorca want to consume and maintain their connection with the center, because it is full.” But, in addition, Rescalvo highlights that “all suppliers are local, as are the employees and collaborators of Hauser. We create synergies with Menorca's economy and build community.”In fact, the decision made during the pandemic to locate one of Hauser & Wirth's international headquarters in Menorca has generated a strong economic and cultural impact on the island. In its shadow, a dozen new art galleries have been established, turning Menorca into a hub of attraction for foreign buyers, which has also extended to the tourist and real estate markets.
Menorca and global art: thus is consolidated the cultural course of the island
Hauser & Wirth, from the Island of King, opens the sixth season in Menorca with an exhibition conceived by the North American Rashid Johnson and participated by 28 artists in search of finding the way amidst collective disorientation.
CiutadellaThe Hauser & Wirth art center, inaugurated five years ago in Menorca with an exhibition by Mark Bradford, now opens its sixth season on Illa del Rei in the port of Maó. It does so alongside Rashid Johnson, a multidisciplinary artist born in Chicago who lands in Menorca with Directionless, a large collective exhibition that he wanted to share with Charles Gaines, Firelei Báez, and Cristina Iglesias so that they could bring the work of artists external to the gallery. Up to 28 creators from ten different countries are represented. Together they shape the largest exhibition ever mounted in this emblematic location, as it occupies both the galleries and the outdoor space of the islet.
The exhibition strips bare the different visions that creators from all over the world have about the context of deep disorientation we are currently experiencing and proposes that we take advantage of this uncertainty productively. “It is not a map, but a set of strategies for continuing to advance when the ground we move on is unknown to us,” Johnson summarizes.
We arrive by boat leaving from the Levante dock of the port of Mahon, with about sixty Italian, French, American, Japanese, and British journalists on board. All of them invited by the gallery to spread the news of the season and the appeal of this space of art and calm in the heart of the Mediterranean.
Rashid Jahnson himself, present at the inauguration, welcomes us and suggests we gather and exchange sensitivities in the admiration of art so that the works create networks within us. "Art is not read, only books are read. Art comes into conflict with you," he says. Afterwards, the exhibition coordinator, Alexis Lowry, takes charge of explaining in detail the connections of all the works exhibited.
All of them with the same link: archaeology, the passage of time, identity, colonialism, legacy and, in this sense, the interest in rocks and substrates, in the material exhibited on an island with so much history. It is a great questioning of art, with color and light as structural elements of the work and always with the gaze fixed on how we orient ourselves in space and time.
This is precisely what Directionless is about. Seeing how, at a time when political credibility has weakened and ecological anxiety intensifies, we no longer have stable points of reference. And it is this temporary loss of direction that is the true engine of this major exhibition, where contemporary and artistic responses, from abstraction, figuration, and collage, are given to this disillusionment.
Charles Gaines contributes in a different way. From the photos of criminals from the 90s photographed at the crime scene with the night sky as it was then, to the 7,500 small handmade tiles that fill the back wall of the first room, all representing the sunrise. It is his way of capturing how we individuals contribute to collective identity.
In the subsequent rooms, we find the imprint of history transformed into art, with references to the Berlin Wall, a woman shaken during independence demonstrations in Barcelona, and 50 small real photos of oppressed Black people in the Southern United States in the 1940s, among others. Not to mention the mental map of race, sexual identity, homophobia, and racism that Lyle Ashton Harris has turned into a chromatic collage of letters, ideas, and personal obsessions. And the conceptual drawings of Baselitz and the large-format proposal Concatenations, by Michael Joo, which exhibits large pillars suspended from the ceiling with the basins used in hospitals by AIDS patients during the hardest period of the epidemic in the 1980s.
Itinerary of sculptures to guide the visitor
Outside, the garden and surroundings of the gallery are also full of sculptures. Almost from the moment of arrival, where we are greeted by Arabic inscriptions that have inspired Rayyane Tabet to create an elegy to Menorca in memory of Abu Umar, who was the last ruler of the Taifa of the island before the Christian reconquest of 1287.
The sculptures have been selected by the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias and also extend across the facades and paths, forming part of the route that the visitor follows and connecting with the architecture and the environment, a protected area in the middle of Europe's second largest natural harbor.
Iglesias links the ensemble formed by the sculptures of Ali Cherri, Mona Hatoum, and Rayyane Tabet to the sea surrounding the island of Rei, which "is also a space of suspension and uncertainty." Like Menorca itself, which, "with its location in the west of the Mediterranean, offers a privileged setting for rethinking how the sea should serve to unite people and cultures and not as a border." The island of Rei is thus filled with works and artists who speak to each other and hint at their different sensitivities.
An educational laboratory between universities
The artistic proposal is complemented by an educational project that, in collaboration with the universities of the Balearic Islands and Barcelona, offers an interactive space to generate new ideas and work methods. In the coming months, until October 25, there will also be live performances, festivals, workshops, conferences, and drawing sessions for all ages.
Tònia Coll from Menorca, a doctor in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona, highlights the positive experience that the collaboration with Hauser & Wirth has entailed. The students in her master's program have interacted with the University of the Balearic Islands to become "mediators and thus be able to explain art to all audiences".
The educational laboratory they have set up and which can be seen at the end of the visit to the exhibition, "links the international character of the artists with the very peculiarity of Menorca to bring art from the ground up".
Coll says she has followed the guidelines of Rashid Johnson himself, "who invites us not to read the work or approach it from reason, but to interact with it. It is an international exhibition that we could perfectly see in the great museums of the world and we must be proud to be able to show it in Menorca".