In 2010, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo organized a gender-centred presentation of its collection. The show was titled Nosotras [Us Girls], a critical nod to the Elles exhibition that had opened at the Centre Pompidou in Paris a few months earlier. It was a statement of intent, announcing that gender issues would be “one of the cross-cutting priorities of the CAAC from now on, taking active measures to ensure true, effective gender parity in both the permanent collection and temporary exhibitions”. And so it has, implementing a gender-balanced programme of both exhibitions and acquisitions.

Nosotras was a watershed, a baseline from which to develop a whole new approach. Since then, the museum has made steady progress in this area, even in the midst of the global recession, and the time is now ripe for an ambitious exhibition that shows how far we have come in the last decade. In the past nine years, the museum has hosted a wide variety of individual exhibitions featuring women artists, for which selected publications are also presented in the show. However, these results are provisional, a kind of litmus test to gauge our achievements and motivate us to redouble our commitment to a balanced, eye-opening vision of the art produced in recent decades.

All the works featured in the exhibition were purchased by the museum, except the two wall pieces by Annika Ström which are gifts. The itinerary can also be divided into two sections, each of which roughly corresponds to one half of the North Cloister. On one side we have works with a social or political message, rooted in feminism or an analysis of the present and recent past, and almost always underscoring the idea that “the personal is political”. In the second part, the works explore issues related to the museum, such as its audiences, its physical location, what it chooses to show or conceal from visitors, and how artworks and apparatuses of vision and intermediation interact with its spaces.