The MACBA presents "MACBA Collection. Prelude. Poetic intention", first exhibition of the Collection curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose

The MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona has presented the new exhibition of the MACBA Collection and the 2023 program. Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA, has presented the MACBA Collection. prelude Poetic intention, the first exhibition of the Collection that he has curated since his arrival and announces the museum's 2023 program.

"Exhibitions are not things that happen in museums, but things that happen to museums," says Elvira Dyangani Ose, director of the MACBA and curator of the MACBA Collection. prelude Poetic intention, together with Antònia Maria Perelló, Claudia Segura and Patricia Sorroche. This new approach to the Collection makes use, to a large extent, of works acquired in recent years that seek new scenarios of relationship with existing works within the museum's holdings, but also with works on loan from local and foreign artists of the same The tour brings together 88 artist books and 127 works by almost a hundred creators, and the selected pieces, as well as the relationship they establish with each other, take center stage.

Poetic intention is understood as an exercise that attempts a break with the institutional framework, offering a space for reflection and criticism where the concept and experience "art" are presented as a generative and emancipatory principle. In this way, a new narrative of stories is set up that includes absences and favors other discourses as common spaces and scenarios of possibility. The museum becomes a place for the works to be : they themselves articulate their legitimacy. In this sense, we will find works such as Updated (1997) by Pep Duran; I Want a President (1992-2018) by Zoe Leonard; Procession of 8 (2017) by Amalia Pica; and Ayuda humanitariania (2008-2022) by Núria Güell, among many others. A unique proposal is the piece Una pared (2022-2024) by Luz Broto, which will cross the Meier building and welcome the public, and to some extent, close the exhibition. A wall that will be built as the exhibition progresses, blurring the lines between interior/exterior, exhibition/circulation, past/future... This presentation of the Collection will generate specific activations, public programs and workshops; in addition, every six months the initial narrative will be transformed by replacing some of the exhibited works. In this way, a living exhibition will be set up that will mutate, like the prelude that it is, until the next presentation at the end of 2024.

Vistes de l'exposició "Col·lecció MACBA. Preludi. Intenció poètica". Foto: Miquel Coll

Exhibition season 2023

The program of temporary exhibitions that will be presented at the MACBA throughout 2023 will make contemporary conflicts visible. Bouchra Khalili (Casablanca, 1975, lives and works in Berlin), artist with a recognized international career, returns to the MACBA, where in 2015 she already exhibited the work Conversation Gardens . On this occasion, it is shown by Bouchra Khalili. Between Circles and Constellations , which will open in February, brings together his projects from the last ten years, including films, videos, installations, photographs and documentary material. The exhibition will feature the European premiere of The Circle (2023), a video installation produced thanks to the contribution of the MACBA Foundation, in collaboration with the Sharjah Art Foundation and the Luma Foundation, which examines and reactivates the legacy of the Arab Workers Movement and its theater groups Al Assifa and Al Halaka in France in the 1970s. The exploration of anti-colonial struggles, post-colonial stories of liberation and solidarity, the focus on the political agency of subjects made invisible by the citizenship model of the nation-state, all these questions raised by Khalili's work will give way to the exhibition dedicated to Laura Lima (Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1971). The exhibition of this artist interested in social relations and the way in which human behavior alters the perception of everyday life will take the unusual format of a choreographed retrospective, a dance of the absurd, almost peripatetic. This is why the original version of his work Balé Literal will be adapted, a kind of bestiary of objects of all kinds and people passing by without pause, which was presented for the first and only time in 2019 at the crossroads where the gallery A Gentil Carioca, in Rio de Janeiro. This new installation of the piece will be reinterpreted at the MACBA, where the exhibition rooms will be transformed into a large walkable device in permanent operation. Thanks to a rudimentary mechanism devised by the artist and activated by several people, the objects that will dance in this choreography will be produced especially for the occasion, although at the same time they will refer to pieces created throughout his artistic career. This very suggestive image of our wandering time will connect at a discursive level with the questions raised by Corpus Infinitum , the project by Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman. What does it mean to mess up western thinking? What other systems of knowledge, across cultures, time, space and form, can we learn or relearn? In the collaborative film works of Denise Ferreira da Silva (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) and Arjuna Neuman (born on a plane in 1984, has two nationalities), the four elements of nature (water, earth, fire, air) they show an intertwined existence, and time and value reimagine knowledge and existence 'in another way'. The exhibition includes installations from his films to date.

In the summer, Nancy Holt. Inside Outside will show a selection of works spanning from 1966 to 1992, including film, video, photography, concrete poetry, audio works, sculpture and large-scale installations, as well as drawings and land documentation artist's art A central figure in the New York art scene, Nancy Holt (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1938 – New York, 2014) was a key member of the land and conceptual art movements, but her work is far less well-known than that of her colleagues. ·male leagues, an unfair situation that this exhibition wants to amend. This is the most ambitious presentation of his multifaceted artistic output. Within the selection of works, the spectacular Ventilation System stands out, a playful sculpture that includes several floors, both interior and exterior, in dialogue with the architecture of the MACBA. Also, a large part of Lydia Ourahmane's projects (Saïda, Algeria, 1992) are based on events in her own environment and on objects with a great social, political or experiential charge. His interests include spirituality, contemporary geopolitics, migration and the complex histories of colonialism. How can we challenge institutional structures? How can we build works that involve active and real protests? Lydia Ourahmane manages to bring what is personal to the political field, and what is domestic to the realm of history. In the autumn, you can visit, in the room of the tower of the museum, a specific proposal by the MACBA of a new production that has been commissioned.

This new work by Ourahmane coincides and connects with the debates included in the first retrospective exhibition in Spain dedicated to Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, born in Barcelona in 1977 and settled in Rio de Janeiro more than fifteen years ago. A place, the artist assures, that constantly and directly links him to the urgent needs of the contemporary world, be they ecological, political or social, themes that run through all his work. Interested in exploring the complex interdependence of the organic world and human action, Steegmann Mangrané also incorporates the theoretical framework of the renowned anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, which breaks the false dichotomy between human reality and the animal world, recovering the idea that we are part of a shared balance and incorporating the paradigm of Amerindian perspectivism. The exhibition brings together drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, films and installations made from the late nineties until today. The Revista Visual exhibition is part of a series of small-format shows that explore periodicals as a space for critical thinking. On this occasion, curated by Juan Bufill, the focus will be on VISUAL magazine. publication of the FILM VIDEO INFORMATION collective (1977-1978). Coordinated by Eugènia Balcells, Eugeni Bonet, Juan Bufill, Carles Hac Mor, Manuel Huerga, Ignasi Julià and Luis Serra, it did not want to be a "cinema" magazine but, as it is read in the prologue of the second issue of the publication (1978) , "information and study notebooks on the audiovisual; obviously from perspectives outside the industry".

Finally, it is necessary to mention, as a separate chapter, Collective Creation , a research project in charge of Elvira Dyangani Ose and María Berríos, new director of research and conservation at MACBA, which will incorporate several agents, artists and researchers, institutions, national and international. This project is born from the new transversality from which all the museum's proposals are articulated, it rescues collective experiences that have worked and are working in the production of the common. Focusing on the processes of collective agency, we will reflect on the question: "Which forms of collectivity and activism, historically and in the present, have generated cultural and social policies that have created institutions?" Among other examples, we will recover case studies that occurred a few years ago such as Laboratoire Agit'Art, a nucleus of revolutionary artistic experimentation promoted in 1974 in Dakar, Senegal, by a group of artists, writers and philosophers who exercised a real and active critique of the institutional frameworks of that country; o Vídeo-Nou, a collective created in Barcelona in 1977 by professionals from various fields, who promoted the use of video as a means of communication and social, cultural, educational and informative dynamism of community life.