This is not a museum: The Skoghall Konsthall of Alfredo Jaar y LiMAC of Sandra Gamarra

Abstract

At the beginning of this century, in the cities of Skoghall, Sweden, and Lima, Perú, the artists Alfredo Jaar (Santiago, 1956) and Sandra Gamarra (Lima, 1972), founded two special museums of contemporary art: The Skoghall Konsthall and LiMAC. Because -until then- none of these cities had one, Jaar and Gamarra intended to supply that void with their respective projects. In this essay, I will analyze some of the issues that both museums set up in relation to the artistic mechanisms and the social practices associated to this kind of institutions. Besides, I suggest that the central strategy of the rhetoric of The Skoghall Konsthall and LiMAC consists in the negation.