"In his famous study The Raw and the Cooked (1964) the Belgian anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss develops an anthropological study about the confrontation between advanced and primitive societies through a summary of concepts of culinary culture - on the degree of the complexity in their food - the conclusions of which he extrapolates to a general plan that allows him to state the inevitable tendency of Western societies in the first world to define their identity by comparing themselves to the other, a phenomenon that is not reciprocal. The exhibition curator, Dan Cameron, intends to submit this idea to criticism, offering an alternative -he begins by inverting the terms in the title- and, through the work of fifty-four artists, he highlights how colonialism, in the field of artistic production and within the emerging trends of the Nineties, is based on the exchange of multiple cultural positions. That is, Cameron aims to include art in the debate on cultural identity, to do this, he brings together works in which dehierarchises the speaker's viewpoint and breaks the theoretical and artistic bipolarity that is dominant in the U.S. and Europe."
More about the exhibition at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía web page.
