In a bakery and in a mayor's office: the MACBA celebrates 30 years of unfolding across Catalonia.

BarcelonaWith the Macba, which will turn 30 on November 28th, the public, the art sector, the MACBA Foundation, and public administrations achieved the great milestone of providing Barcelona with a world-class contemporary art museum. "These 30 years have been, and continue to be, years in which we have worked with a very important responsibility, which is to disseminate the modern and contemporary heritage of Catalan art, and also of international art," says the museum's director, Elvira Dyangani Ose. "And we also have the responsibility to foster," she adds, "and we have done so a great deal, the critical spirit of a society that we want to be critical, conscious, and also supportive, and to generate new narratives to make visible and accommodate other knowledge and other ways of understanding the world."

The permanent collection will be one of the main protagonists of the 30th anniversary. The exhibition Like a Dance of Starlings. Macba Collection: Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being (from November 28, 2025 to November 28, 2026) will feature some 200 works by around fifty artists, critically reviewing the museum's history to date. The image of the flight of the starlings refers to how the works "adjust and regroup in different presentations, forming knots or maps of meaning," says Clàudia Segura, head of the collection and curator of the exhibition along with assistant curator Núria Montclús.

In addition, videos and archival materials from the collection will leave the Meier building and will be on display between June and November 2026 in unusual locations throughout Catalonia, such as a dentist's waiting room, a bakery, a veterinarian's office, a football field locker room, a rehearsal space, or the Mandan office. The museum is also promoting a new exhibition project featuring the collection in the thirty art centers across the country that are part of the Catalan Public System of Visual Arts Facilities (SPEAV). The museum also continues its collaboration with the Barcelona Provincial Council with the traveling exhibition. And suddenly, chance. Uncertainties, destinies, and coincidences in the MACBA Collection (from November 7 to January 23, 2028), curated by Claudia Elies. It will be on view in ten municipalities in Barcelona. Furthermore, the public program linked to the museum's anniversary, entitled Murmur, in December there will be a tribute to the enigmatic artist known as Tres (1956-2016) consisting of the blackout Blackout #33, to turn the MACBA into "a space of silence and shared listening." Another performance, co-organized with the Fundació Joan Miró, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary, will be the Dora García exhibition.

Among the temporary exhibitions, the celebrations will begin with the ambitious and pioneering Projecting a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africa (from November 6 to April 6), a pioneering review with some 350 works by a hundred artists of the art of the African diaspora. One of the most relevant features of the exhibition is that it breaks with the uniform vision that is often given to Pan-Africanism, and presents it as a diverse universe. In addition to MACBA, the exhibition is organized by the Barbican Center in London and the KANAL Pompidou Center in Brussels, and the curators are Dyangani herself and Antawan Byrd, Adom Getachew and Matthew S. Witkovsky. In Barcelona, the exhibition will have the distinctive feature that it will delve into the relationship of African intellectuals in the Civil War, and the Black Files by Tania Safurs Adam, which could be seen at the last Manifiesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana.

The programming will continue with The third twist, by the artist Anna Moreno (Barcelona, ​​​​1984), the contribution of the Macba to the events of Barcelona 2026 World Capital of Architecture (from February 4 to July 5, 2026). Moreno documents, in the format of a road movie, the state of a nomadic settlement designed by architect Ricardo Bofill in the Algerian Sahara on behalf of then-Algerian President Houari Boumédiène. What was supposed to be a modern complex ended up incomplete and ruined, reflecting the tensions between utopian dreams and colonial reality. In addition, Moreno explores two other projects by Bofill and connects them with three stories by J.G. Ballard. This project is the final part of a trilogy that reflects on "temporality through utopian architecture and the potential of its speculative imagination."

The first exhibition in the State of the artist duo of Palestinian descent Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme will be on view (from February 13 to June 28, 2026). Both artists live and work between New York and Ramallah and have been collaborating since 2007. The core of the exhibition will be a new immersive, multi-channel audiovisual installation, created specifically for the space where it will be exhibited, in which the artists investigate various forms of spectral presence and storytelling through poems. The video installation will be a co-production with Nottingham Contemporary and the Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam and will be part of the Macba collection.

Exhibitions by Stan Douglas and the Vídeo-Nou collective

In line with the great names from the 60s and 70s to whom the MACBA has dedicated exhibitions, on May 14, 2026, a retrospective of the Canadian Stan Douglas (Ontario, 1960) will arrive. He is known for his exploration of the way in which technology and the media affect perception and collective memory. This exhibition is a co-production with the Jeu de Paume. The exhibition will be on display in Barcelona until January 10, 2027, and will then be on display at the Parisian center.

Also in line with audiovisual work, it will then arrive Light entered through the cracks. Collective creation in motion: from community video to contemporary collaborative practices. (from July 23, 2026 to January 11, 2027), curated by the museum's research director, María Berríos, and artist Daniel Gasol. The central focus is the experience of the Vídeo-Nou / Community Video Service collective in Catalonia during the Transition, known for its understanding of video as a political and social tool capable of generating processes of self-organization, neighborhood empowerment, and counter-information. Starting from this historic center, the exhibition unfolds into different thematic areas that interweave archives, practices, and strategies of other national and international collectives, both historical and contemporary.

The 30th year of MACBA has a budget in line with this year's, €12.6 million, although it has not yet been finalized. The program will conclude with a bang, with a retrospective of Barcelona-based artist Aurèlia Muñoz (1926–2011), considered a key figure in understanding contemporary textile art worldwide (from November 5, 2026, to March 29, 2027). A previously unseen selection of large macramé structures from Spanish, European, and American institutional collections will be on display, as well as a broad selection of her drawings, which have also not been publicly shown before.

The Muñoz retrospective is organized by MACBA with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and has been conceived as a collective project for the Einaidea research platform of the Eina Foundation, in close collaboration with the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive. The project is scientifically directed by Manuel Cirauqui, director of Einaidea, and the curators are Rosa Lleó, associate researcher at Einaidea; Silvia Ventosa Muñoz, head of the Aurèlia Muñoz Archive; and Aída Roger, assistant curator at MACBA.