It is not an exhibition on television but from television. In point of fact it is an essay on the intersection of separate worlds—it explores choreography, the strategy used by the medium and these exceptional tenants (artists and philosophers) when it comes to formalising their expectations.

The artists and the medium study one another in order to understand what it is that makes television possible, its social relevance, the aesthetic dimension of artistic production on television and the implications of putting a face to philosophy. The exercise is an eloquent contribution to the interpretation of the dramatic and technical conventions that define television. Artistic invention takes all the liberties it can to generate realities never seen on TV; philosophy unites image and voice and its lack of interest in fiction creates another form of fiction.

The programmes included in the different sections share a common feature: they show television and its double. To inhabit television means at once to accept it and to force it to speak a different tongue, so that the spectator bears witness to how television is made and unmade. Artists and philosophers show an interest in rewriting the medium, establishing unexpected equivalences between text and image, the conventional space of the studio and the white cube of the museum, the reality recorded by the camera outside the studio and the unreality derived from the mediation of television.

Are You Ready for Television? boasts the participation of artists such as Dora García and Johan Grimonprez, and will be accompanied by a script consisting of ten chapters that will include a limited number of situational examples. The exhibition space is therefore transformed into an event that enables us to explore the relationship between images and criticism. From its own point of view, each chapter will present rejoinders between languages and fields—from art to television, from television to thought, and viceversa.

Exhibition organised by Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) and coproduced with Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC).