Abundant Futures. Works from the TBA21 Collection, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

The generous selection of works from TBA21’s collection places a wealth of artistic visions and propositions into conversation, gathering different generations of artists across multiple geographies, and working in a variety of media. Artworks on view include several works by Olafur Eliasson, such as the photography series The glacier melt series (1999/2019, 2019) capturing several dozen glaciers in Iceland as part of his ongoing project to document the receding and melting icy landscapes of the country, as well as a large installation titled Reversed Waterfall (1998), Eliasson’s nod to the hydraulic mastery of the Alhambra’s watercourses, in the outdoor garden. Asunción Molinos Gordo’s recent series of sculptural works, ¡Cuánto río allá arriba! (2021) locates the varied uses riverine water has had in history and Regina de Miguel’s paintings offer science-futuristic visions of multi-species beings or cosmic representations. Camille Henrot’s I Say, (2017), a casted aluminum, bronze sculpture that resembles a potentially sensual embrace of limbs has been exhibited previously at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. 

By drawing on the works and practices of TBA21´s 20 year history, Abundant Futures hopes to ignite advanced readings and understandings in collaboration with new voices invited to interact with artists and thinkers who have played a central role in TBA21´s 20 year journey. While centering around the thought-provoking narratives encapsulated in the collection, the overall program developed in collaboration with C3A will be activated by lectures, performances, installations, residencies, and public interventions by artists, practitioners, thinkers, and a multi-facetted audience, creating a powerful nexus of debate and thinking.

Daniela Zyman, Curator,  comments:
“Abundant Futures is an essay exhibition that imagines worldmaking and ecological futures from the condition of abundance and fullness. Embracing abundance as a life-proliferating principle, it pays homage to the living environment, what nourishes it, what circulates and gathers in it. While questioning the always-limited and limiting promises of austerity, prosperity, and progress, artists in the show explore how the abundance of possibilities must be cultivated and socially enacted. Abundant Futures, therefore, builds on the vital and inexpugnable principles of life itself, while exploring regenerative, healing, and commoning practices, across different scales.” 

Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, Founder and Chairwoman, TBA21,  comments:
“The theme of this exhibition beautifully draws on the gratitude that we may feel when acknowledging the abundance of the world around us, as opposed to our obsession with scarcity driven by our consumer mentality that is deeply embedded in our DNA. What I think is important at this moment is the need to re-evaluate everything in our life, our careers, our passions and our relationships in order to transform them through art into an existence of plentitude  and collaboration. It is with this in mind that we at TBA21 are so extremely grateful to the city of Córdoba and the Junta of Andalucia for giving us this three year opportunity to look inwards as much as we are sensing and developing outward. We are seeking out boundaries, and testing our methods that have taken time to develop whilst applying them to a new location, which itself has an extraordinary history of tolerance that  inspires us all.”

Note to Editors

For further information and images, please contact Scott & Co:
Sala Shaker E: sala@scott-andco.com,  T:+44 20 3487 0077

Artist List: 

Ai Weiwei, Allora & Calzadilla, Dana Awartani, Claudia Comte, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Elena Damiani, Regina de Miguel, Patricia Domínguez, Olafur Eliasson, Mario García Torres, Isa Genzken, Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, Mathilde ter Heijne, Camille Henrot, Yeo Siew Hua, Ann Veronica Janssens, Sarah Lucas, Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, Ana Mendieta, Beatriz Milhazes, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Paulo Nazareth, Ernesto Neto, Rivane Neuenschwander, Olaf Nicolai, Plata, Diana Policarpo, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Matthew Ritchie, Thomas Ruff, Bernardo Salcedo, Tomás Saraceno, Teresa Solar, Simon Starling, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Janaina Tschäpe, Susanne M. Winterling, Cerith Wyn Evans, Heimo Zobernig. 

About TBA21   

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is a leading international art and advocacy foundation created in 2002 by the philanthropist and collector Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza, representing the fourth generation of the Thyssen family’s commitment to the arts and public service. The TBA21 Foundation—based in Madrid and Vienna, with situated projects in Venice and Cordoba—stewards the TBA21 Collection and its outreach activities, which include exhibitions, fellowships, residencies, educational and public programming, and policy interventions. TBA21–Academy is the research center of the foundation and an incubator for collaborative experience, artistic production, and new forms of knowledges by combining art and science. All activity at TBA21 Foundation is fundamentally driven by artists and the belief in art and culture as a carrier of social and environmental transformation and change. 

In 2022, the 20th anniversary year of the foundation, a new situated project is launched in a three-year partnership with the City of Córdoba, which will encompass an array of exhibitions created from the collection as well as residencies, performances, and educational programs at C3A Córdoba and in public space. The program in Córdoba and the inaugural exhibition Abundant Futures place an emphasis on the centrality of regenerative and healing practices to reorient the relationship with the commons and non-human others, towards futures of thriving communities and relationships. The works selected from the TBA21 Collection testify to the artistic and ecological ethos of the past two decades of working with artists towards new forms of production, action, inquiry, and environmental conservation. 

Following its 10 year exclusive commitment to the Ocean, TBA21–Academy  now expands its research practices and methodologies to  the Guadalquivir River in Córdoba, exploring its histories and possible futures. The results from its ocean-centered activities, long-term and multi-format research strands, led by artists in dialogue with multiple disciplines and practices, such as policy, activism, and conservation, are the foundation for a new platform investigating wider bodies of water including rivers and salt marshes. To build on this legacy and share our approach beyond traditional museological standards, we believe that a cultural response is necessary in order to shift paradigms towards more imaginative and regenerative thinking, which in turn will lead to more sustainable and abundant futures. This is how TBA21 seeks to define its future: we aim to shift our practice away from traditional collecting to generous, creative, and engaging programming to lower our carbon footprint and to spark new strategies of cultural emergence. 

About C3A Centre for Contemporary Creation of Andalusia

The Andalusian Contemporary Creation Center-C3A was inaugurated in December 2016 with the intention of becoming a reference center for artistic creation and production. During these years a complete program has been carried out, consisting of exhibitions, activities, courses, workshops, performances, concerts, and artistic residencies, which have made it possible to forge a meeting place and development of different artistic disciplines.Unlike other museums or contemporary art centers, the C3A focuses primarily on production, creation and experimentation, one of its distinguishing characteristics being the emphasis not only on finished works, but also on the creative process, for bringing the result in development closer to the public. For this reason, artistic residencies and live arts have great relevance in its programming. The C3A has an annual program of temporary exhibitions that includes national and international proposals that bring together the latest trends in contemporary art, in addition to focusing another line of its programming on Andalusian artists and on the sample of the works resulting from the programs of production. The C3A is based in a building by the architects Nieto and Soberano, closely linked to the architectural tradition of the Hispanic Muslim culture. 

About Daniela Zyman

Daniela Zyman is artistic director of TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. She joined TBA21 in 2003 and has played an instrumental role in co-shaping its exhibitions and commissions program. Between 1995 and 2001 Daniela was chief curator of the MAK–Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna, which included the founding and programming of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles. From 2000 to 2003 she worked as the artistic director of the Künstlerhaus, Vienna and as director of A9 Forum Transeuropa. Her long-term inquiries into forms of artistic “counter-research” led to a PhD dissertation. Daniela is lecturing at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz, and frequently authors essays for art publications.

About Córdoba

Córdoba is the capital of the province of Córdoba in southern Spain and the third largest city in Andalusia. With antecedents dating back to Roman antiquity, the city is marked by its historical heritage and many buildings from the period of Moorish rule, when Córdoba was–for a short period in historical time but with long-term historical reverberations–the centre of government and learning in the Iberian Peninsula and one of the largest cities in the world. The Mezquita-Catedral is the city's most important building, which was built as a mosque from 784 and extended several times. With an area of 23,000 m², it would be the third largest mosque in the world today. In 1236, the year of the reconquest by the Christians, the mosque was consecrated as a Christian cathedral. In the centre of the mosque, a massive Renaissance-style nave was built over 234 years, starting in 1523. The Mezquita-Catedral has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984, and the entire old town of Córdoba since 1994.