Between the Frames: The Forum (1983-93) is the result of
Muntadas's interest in understanding why the intermediaries
between the artist, the artwork and the public gained so much
power in the 1980s. The installation comprises eight sections,
each corresponding to an intermediary - dealers, collectors,
galleries, museums, docents, critics, media and artists - arranged
in a circular structure that evokes the form of a Panopticon. By
means of a critical essay and an interview with Muntadas, Anne
Benichou, the editor of this publication, reveals how the artist's
working process is more archaeological than documentary in its
approach. The emphasis is not so much on what is said or on
who says it, but on allowing the public to use this space to
construct their own narratives."

In a year when Spanish curators directed the Venice Biennale for the first time, Antoni Muntadas, representing Spain in the Spanish pavilion, told a reporter that the Biennale "takes its ideas from international fairs. It connotes the theme park. There was exoticism, invention, the new... but by now it is an obsolete structure." Muntadas's On Translation: I Giardini, the latest in a series of often site-specific On Translation projects completed over the last 10 years, is here documented from its inception. Translation is a metaphor, as Muntadas states, "I am not talking about translation in a literal sense, but in a cultural sense--how the world we live in is a totally translated world, everything is always filtered by some social, political, cultural and economic factor... by the media, of course, by context and by history." Accordingly, I Giardini looks into the context and history of the Biennale's Giardini del Castello, delving into the transformations and "translations" it has undergone over time, and investigating Venice's status and the space that frames the Biennale. Muntadas notes, for instance, that a new Italian pavilion built on Mussolini's orders was replaced again after the war.