Humor in art: a group of graduates of the MUN's Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies present their exhibition proposal for the Bergé Collection in Madrid.

What role does humor play in contemporary art? How do artists use this procedure? These are some of the questions that Eva del Llano, María Gallegos and Jaime Guillén, graduates of the IV promotion of the Master in Curatorial Studies at Museo Universidad de Navarra asked themselves when they explored the Bergé Collection and noticed that humorous and playful elements were recurrent in many of its works. The result of this research was A Joke is a Serious Thing: Humor in Art through the Bergé Collection, an exhibition project chosen among the Master's Thesis, which will be exhibited next summer at the MUN.

Last Thursday they presented it at the Cuatrecasasas office in Madrid, where the young curators held a meeting with the public, accompanied by Gabriel Pérez Barreiro, curator and director of the TFM; María Aguilera, curator of the Bergé Collection and member of the defense of the TFM; and Nieves Acedo, director of the postgraduate course.

The proposal seeks to show humor as a procedure used by artists to address current issues and thus provoke the viewer's reflection on the world and the circumstances that surround them. "Humor is a medium in our exhibition, not an exhibition theme. We are not interested in treating it as a theme or content; on the contrary, it constitutes a vehicle to point to other themes. In each work, the artist deals with different issues, but all of them use that jovial and light-hearted language that attracts the viewer. According to our appreciation of contemporary art and the vision we have formed about humor from the research for this project, we consider that this resource is quite common, but to the same extent that we coexist with humor in any other field of culture such as cinema, television or comics...", the curators explain.

CAPTIVATED BY THE BERGÉ COLLECTION

From the beginning, the graduates explain, they felt a strong connection with the pieces in the Bergé Collection, which helped them face the challenge: "Each of them caught our attention for different reasons, and little by little we followed a common thread that helped us shape the project. We were captivated by so many works, which meant a chaotic beginning with a miscellany of ideas that we had to refine".

Thus, they recall that reaching a consensus on which pieces to choose and how to work with them was not an easy task. "The trust we had, with many works in common, helped us to put aside personal interest, that is, we stopped thinking about what we wanted from this project, to start thinking about what the works offer to the viewer. This was very important, because they have an enormous strength and we had to enhance it and not hide it under our interests as curators," they point out.

In this sense, the training received during the Master's Degree in Curatorial Studies has helped them carry out the project, which constitutes, in their words, "a central piece of the Master's Degree". "Especially in the second semester, when we started to develop it, essential subjects such as Communication, with Lola Iglesias; Conservation Protocols, with Asunción Domeño; or Art and Space, with Javier Antón, to mention a few that gave us a direct application to our Master's Thesis. Undoubtedly, this project has materialized many of the teachings of the master's degree, moving from the theoretical to the practical level. We consider this to be fundamental for the assimilation of much of what we have learnt". In the summer, the exhibition will be on display in the Museum's Torre hall.