The exhibition Crime as Ornament is part of this year's gallery festival CURATED BY which runs under the theme Untold Narratives. It is curated by María Inés Plaza Lazo and features a wide variety of different artistic approaches and media, all of them addressing issues of cultural diversity and suppressed recognition.

The title of the exhibition refers to the essay Ornament and Crime by the Austrian architect and publicist Adolf Loos from 1908, which is considered a key impulse for the dawn of modernism. In this essay, Loos establishes his vision of reduced, unadorned form. He castigated ornamentation as an intolerable, degenerative phenomenon of the aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie, which, like its creators, had outlived its usefulness and had to be replaced by sober, objective honesty. At the same time, he distinguishes the ornaments of “simple cultures”, which today would be categorized as belonging to the “global South”, from the exuberant, ornamental dictates of taste of the European elites, and he recognizes their truthfulness and beauty.

In the exhibition Crime as Ornament, curator María Inés Plaza Lazo poses the question of the extent to which Loos' postulate was the arrogant expression of a Western cultural hegemony that marginalized foreign aesthetics and formal language - or, on the contrary, called for the differentiation that makes sincere respect and undivided recognition of the “other” possible in the first place. In this respect, she takes up the ideas in this year's Curated by impulse text by Noit Banai, which deals with cultural diversity and the subjective perception of beauty and could be understood as a counter-thesis to Loos' rigid, strict idea of aesthetics.

The works on display reveal precisely what Banai refers to and what Loos already hinted at: The complexity of the debates we are having today about identity, repression and paternalism. The deep roots of these debates in the distant past. And the difficult-to-resolve contradiction that arises not only from different cultural influences, but also from perspectives, perceptions, categorisations, interpretations - and misunderstandings.