Cool Hunting

LiMAC, billing itself as the Lima Museum of Contemporary Art, is in fact a fiction. It inhabits no physical space; it commissions no works; it does not host any real exhibits. The art, though, is real, taken from actual catalogs around the world to create an interesting visual visit.

While not a brick-and-mortar institution, it has replicated the trappings of an art museum complete with souvenir gift bags (above right) and pens in its online shop as mementos of visits that did not—and likely will not—ever occur. Hidden among the fakes, there are some literal artworks, such as founder Sandra Gamarra's free postcards available for download and her watercolor "Guided Visit." (Pictured below left.)

"Our museum has begun its construction from the end; it begins as a memory of what has not yet been lived," writes the Peruvian-born Gamarra in an essay that explains the thinking behind the illusion.

LiMAC is a conceptual art piece that playfully explores and deconstructs the institutions that house contemporary art in modern society, while at the same time questioning the line between fact and fiction in its actual institution, the internet. It's a thought-provoking experiment.