Introduction

What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms features thought-provoking contemporary works from SFMOMA's collection that offer individual artistic responses to questions about life and art.

Presented as a series of episodes with rotating artworks, the first proposition includes works by Matthew Barney, Rosa Barba, João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, Walter Hood, Byron Kim, Tatsuo Miyajima, Yoko Ono, Ebony G. Patterson, Lorna Simpson, and Naama Tsabar. These works propose engagements with both physicality and the ephemeral, addressing tangible matter of artistic media as well as urgent subject matters. Across the eight rooms of this collection display materials, conditions of space and architecture, and, most importantly, social relations are addressed.

On view will be Barba's Boundaries of Consumption (2012) which features two metal balls moving unpredictably on top of a stack of film cans. Their choreography is documented by two restless shadows contrasted with a colored film strip projected onto the wall. The celluloid passes through the pile of cans, randomly lifting and destabilizing it. Within the interplay between instability and balance, the projector illuminates the balls and causes their movement and thereby exists as phenomenon and idea simultaneously. A tension builds between all the constitutive elements of the sculpture—somewhere in between a balancing act and a magic trick, the two balls morph into one and become two again in the projection.

What Matters: A Proposition in Eight Rooms
With Rosa Barba
SFMOMA
151 Third St
San Francisco
From July 22, 2023
www.sfmoma.org