Decolonial and collective: this will be the look of Macba in 2023

Is it possible to look at a museum as a set of social relations and not as a hermetic building isolated from the world? Can the institutional framework of the museum be broken from the institution itself? How are new cultural and social dialogues established from there knowing that, historically, it has been an apparatus that has legitimized social imbalance? Clearing up the doubts raised by these questions will be the road map of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (Macba) in 2023. This is how he has defended it its director, Elvira Dyangani Ose, when presenting the appointments and activities of the space for the coming months. “A plan to break with modern and historical ideology” that goes through seven monographic exhibitions (Bouchra Khalili, Nancy Holt, Laura Lima or Daniel Steegman, among others); a long-term research project on forms of collectivity and activism (Collective Creation); the signing of the Sevillian architect Santiago Cirugeda and Alice Attout (Urban Recipes) to offer a free-use space for the residents of Raval (traveling garden) and an independent study program (PEI) to study decolonial practices in collaboration with the Akademie der Künste der Welt in Cologne and La Colonie in Paris.

“We have two key cross-cutting lines: the decolonial gaze and paying attention to how artists dialogue with collective memory to introduce constellations into their stories”, Dyangani summed up when presenting to the press what will happen at MACBA in the coming months. And she has done so surrounded by some of the new artists joining the museum collection (Pedro Torres, Ignasi Aballí, Amalia Pica, Laia Estruch or Regina Gimenez, among others), whose works are related to other existing works in those funds. in Prelude. poetic intention, an exhibition that takes its title from the homonymous book by the poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant and that can be seen for free at open days between December 14 and 18. There, 88 artist books and 127 works by almost a hundred creators have been brought together to establish what Dyangani has labeled as “a disarticulation of the museum’s dramaturgy”.

An approach to favor common spaces in which the exhibition space itself is discussed and questioned. This is how it happens in the installation updated (1977) by Pep Durán —who asks to step on and walk through it, even bending over, to provoke the ability to intervene within the artistic discourse—, or the singular piece A wall (2022-2024), by Luz Broto, which will cross the Meier building and welcome the public, mutating for two years. The exhibition also delves into historical revisionism, focusing on colonial and post-colonial Spain, offered by two works by Daniela Ortiz (Spanish, this is the gold you eat and Nation-State, where Barcelona’s slavery past is collected) and Nuria Güell, who in Humanitarian aid (2008-2013) created a project on how “love had become the passport of the illusion of freedom” in which he called a kind of public contest in which the Cuban who wrote the letter of marriage was offered as a wife. most beautiful love in the world The winner, chosen by a jury of three prostitutes, would travel to Spain to marry her, get her papers, and then divorce her, splitting them half after the sale of the artwork itself.

In poetic intention there is also space to reflect on femininity and gender roles, where the acquisition of the mural stands out Phrase d’Or: she tea molts nomsof dora garcia (2020) or nothing reiterated (2005-2008), by Mar Arza, where the artist has cut out and emptied Carmen Laforet’s 1944 text on female oppression and suffocation and has printed the 87 pages of the novel, leaving some strategic words on display to reiterate that emptiness. postwar existential

Give visibility to conflicts

The Macba will bet in 2023 to put on the table the social conflicts that are going through us in its temporary exhibitions. The Moroccan artist based in Berlin Bouchra Khalili will arrive in February with Between circles and constellations to investigate and reflect on speech and collective memory, as well as the European premiere of The Circle (2013), one of his video installations on the legacy of the Arab Workers Movement and the theater groups linked to it in France in the 1970s. On March 30 it will be exhibited Laura Lima. literal balletwhich after performing on the streets of Río de Jareino in 2019 will arrive at Macba to offer new ways of presenting a retrospective.

The critique of the transformation of man’s hierarchy over nature will arrive in April with Corpus Infinity, a project by the philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva and the filmmaker Arjuna Neuman where the works use attachment and ways of understanding the multispecies world to reflect on the decomposition of the world. In June it will be the turn of Nancy Holt. Inside Outsidea retrospective to correct the forgetfulness of a key figure in the New York scene of the land art who never gained recognition from his male contemporaries.

In October, the exhibitions of Lydia Ourahmane, the Algerian artist trained in Goldsmiths who lives between Barcelona and Algiers and reflects on spirituality and contemporary geopolitics through sculpture, video and sound pieces, and that of Daniel Steegman Mangrané will coexist. This will be the first retrospective of the Spanish state of the Barcelonan who settled in Rio de Janeiro more than 15 years ago and which explores the relationships between human beings and nature with an aesthetic language close to neo-concretism. November will be the time visual magazinewhich will investigate the formation of the Film Video Information (FVI) collective in Barcelona in the 1970s, made up of experimental film and video authors.

A free space in the Raval

Beyond the exhibition, the will to bring positions closer in the debate on public space and the relationship of the museum with its environment stands out. Dyangani Ose has announced the creation of traveling garden, “a community and co-responsibility space” that will be launched this season through meetings with neighbors and related entities in the neighborhood to, as explained by the director of Macba, “break with the dynamics established in the museum and subvert them to introduce the desire of the other”. An integration project that will work with Recetas Urbanas, Santiago Cirugeda’s guerrilla architecture project, known for promoting responsible urbanism.

the ad arrives after the protests for the future extension of the museum in the plaça dels Àngels. “We are attentive to how the neighbors experience this process. We want to work with those who do not feel challenged by the museum and offer a space for dialogue”, Dyangani Ose highlighted, emphasizing that the MACBA’s claim is to be able to become “radically public”.

Men go less to Macba

With 210,000 visits as of November 30, 2022 and hoping to close the year with 230,000 visits, the Macba visitor profile is that of a woman between the ages of 20 and 39, local (60% of visitors are) and who comes alone or accompanied by one or two people.

The museum’s budget will increase by 21% in 2023 and will stand at 12,831,366 euros, of which 10,981,444 come from the public administrations that make up the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Consortium and 1,849,922 from own income.

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