"Mixed Memories" by Carla Hayes at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum presents, from February 14th to May 15th, Memories mixed, an exhibition in which the Afro-Andalusian artist Carla Hayes Mayoral (Málaga, 1997), based on her identity inquiry, asks us about the past. colonial in Spain and Europe and subverts hegemonic history from a decolonial and feminist perspective. This is the fifth installment of the Kora program, curated by Rocío de la Villa, which each year presents an exhibition at the museum conceived from a gender perspective.

Memoirs brings together a total of nine works, five of them installed in the exhibition hall on the first floor, with direct access from the museum lobby, and four more, made for the occasion, distributed in different rooms of the permanent collection, in dialogue with paintings by ancient masters such as Rubens, Jan Davidsz. by Heem, Jacques Linard and Frans Hals.

The material used in the pieces, the raffia, becomes the common thread of a story that speaks of the artist's own life experiences as a mixed race woman - childhood memories, fantasies, historical research, old stories already mythologized ... -, rescuing episodes of colonial history.

From the combination of this material so characteristic of African culture, along with the ancestral technique of weaving and the visual references of the Western collective imagination, Hayes Mayoral deploys a neo-baroque scenographic narrative that subverts the notion of space. of power. The theatricality and surprise at the careful execution of the pieces, in which elegance and rusticity are intermingled with a seemingly aestheticistic end, lead to the deconstruction of the hegemonic tale.