The Prisoner's Dilemma

The Prisoner's Dilemma: Selections from the Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection will feature works that explore how artists respond to the exercise of power in contemporary society.

Throughout history, artists have employed various methods to expose and resist oppressive regimes and power structures. This is evident in a range of well-known examples—from contemporary drawings and medieval tapestries illustrating the 10th Century Sack of Tunis to Rubens's The Rape of the Sabine Women and Goya's Disasters of War, as well as post-World War II films by Roberto Rossellini and Vietnam-era works by Jean-Luc Godard, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, and others. These pieces continue to resonate and provoke strong emotions, even after hundreds of years.

Today, visual artists have successfully claimed the space once dominated by Hollywood and mainstream cinema. Through photography, installation, performance, and moving images—often used together—they tackle contemporary social issues with a depth and impact that the corporate film industry struggles to match. The works in this exhibition engage with and challenge totalizing power and social control. Their expansive and immersive nature stands out in an era when traditional cinema has lost much of its phenomenological power to miniaturization and portability, fostering a strong sense of immediacy and connection to their subjects. This collection explores themes of powerlessness, exclusion, conformity, marginality, transgression, subversion, escapism, transcendence, protest, and resistance in inventive ways.

Artists

Francis Alÿs, Alexander Apóstol, Alexandre Arrechea, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck, Judith, Barry, Paolo Canevari, Stan Douglas, Jimmie Durham, Cao Fei, Regina José Galindo, Carlos Garaicoa, Mathilde Ter Heijne, Thomas Hirschhorn, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Priscilla Monge, Carlos Motta, Antoni Muntadas, Shirin Neshat, Julian Rosefeldt, Eve Sussman, Frank Thiel, Susan Turcot, Monika Weiss.