Curated by Caterina Almirall, the exhibition is part of the Support for Creation'22 program. Comisart, and is conceived as a group that claims to be together to make art, because, beyond individual contributions, working means sharing.

The Tree of What You Don’t Yet Know casts us between what someone has said or done at some time before us and what we are saying and doing as a group of women right here, right now. As artists, we don’t think of themselves as exceptional, original, individual creators but rather as participants—mothers, daughters, friends—in a broader context, as part of a network within an ecosystem from which we draw strength while also feeding back our own input. By bringing women artists together, we aim to understand art as a shared endeavour where the boundaries between the individual and the collective become blurred in favour of thinking about their relationship with the collection and the exhibition space. The show becomes a collective space that summons not only works of art but also whatever it is that each of them signals or questions: they all allude to something “outside” them, either by incorporating something that has come before or by leaving room for others to enter. The collection is seen as one big family, in the widest sense of kinship, like Donna Haraway’s notion of making kin; like when Margaret Mead ponders the strangeness of being a grandmother, a biological tie that extends beyond her; or when Céline Condorelli suggests understanding female friendship as a way of working together, as well as a means of escaping from work, in order to become something that transcends one’s own endeavours—a whole whose sum is greater than its parts.

The Tree of What You Don’t Yet Know aims to tell a somewhat different story than usual: the same events experienced in another way. These artworks don’t seek to explain anything or serve as a discursive artefact; they aren’t searching for the origin, the first and foremost, but are rooted in the premise that something has always come before, something we don’t yet know. And they do so as both conscientious host and humble novice. We are invited to spend time with these bodies and images, open and closed, and relish their incompleteness. The title, taken from Sílvia Gubern’s piece in the show, cautions us that there is no safe place, only subtler or bolder gestures that destabilise or question everyday premises, unanswered questions, repetitions, cracks, ethereal inklings.

The Tree of What You Don’t Yet Know explores a double-edged relationship between the whole and its parts: art collections enable pieces to converse, to share a time, space and life within the interpretive framework and sequence of assumptions and circumstances that brought them here; yet each one also necessarily retains its own unique nature. In presenting her own take on the collection, the curator forges a path to help us see it not as an assemblage of particles but as a dialogue in which these artists look at each other, question each other, challenge each other and learn from each other, even across different generations and continents. This approach means taking a stand here and now to reread the legacy of contemporary art in museum collections, moving away from paradigms of originality and individual inspiration to view works through crosscutting, contingent, spiritual and longer-term perspectives. The Tree of What You Don’t Yet Know seeks to bring women together—spectators, artists, specialists or novices, young and old alike—so that each and every one of us, from our own place, can relate to art based on what we know and what sparks our curiosity, while leaving room for learning, intuition, imagination, desire and whatever it may be that we don’t yet know.