The MACBA collection is powerful

BarcelonaPublic museums belong to everyone, but ensuring everyone is represented remains a constant struggle. That's why the series of portraits by photographer Onofre Bachiller (Murcia, 1959), curated by the head of the collection at the museum, is such a breath of fresh air. MacbaClàudia Segura has chosen this space to welcome the public to the museum's new collection exhibition. It is the museum's 30th anniversary exhibition, entitled Like a dance of starlings. MACBA Collection: Thirty years and infinite ways of being and can be visited until September 28, 2026. Pasted onto the immaculate walls of the Meier building like posters, the subjects of Bachiller's portraits joined, during a night out, the game proposed by the artist: to have their own portraits taken in some of the photo booths and in a gay bar in the Eixample district between 1987 and 2000.

Bachiller himself says that the project is the result of his fascination with Paul Auster's film. SmokeAnd now these portraits, a small part of the 3,000 he made, appear as a privileged document of the emergence ofAcid Housethe festivals of drag queens organized by New York nightlife queen Susanne Bartsch and the emergence of the gay movement. "We didn't want to do a retrospective exhibition that would cover the 30 years of the collection in an encyclopedic way, which we will do in 2027 to inaugurate the museum's expansion, but rather to look back and celebrate what this collection has been through the image of the starlings, which is the image of a polyphony of multiple images that can later change," says Clàudia Segura, who collaborated with Núria Montclús, cataloger and documentarian of the Macba collection, as curator.

“The image of the starlings allowed us to talk about the relationship between the individual and the collective, about contemporary subjectivity, which is no longer constrained by the models of modernity,” Segura emphasizes. “That subject belonged to a very specific race, a very specific gender, and a very specific social code, and now we celebrate that the subject is porous.” Likewise, to celebrate the museum’s 30th anniversary, a grand party has been organized for this Thursday, which includes the performance Murmurs I. Ceremonialswith Jorge Dutor and Guillem Mont de Palol (at 7 pm) and the museum will be open until midnight. In addition, three open house days begin this Thursday and run until Saturday. For the director of the MACBA, Elvira Dyangani Ose, the exhibition is a "spectacular" offering that "closely reflects the museum's thirty-year history."

Icons of the collection

The exhibition includes some 200 works by about 50 artists, and is full of new additions: nearly half of the works are being exhibited for the first time at the museum, and 15% are acquisitions from the last three years, including Yanomami Dreams, by Claudia Andujar; Caterpillarismby Rosario Zorraquín, and Body actionsby Esther Ferrer, acquired through the MACBA Foundation. One of the selection criteria was the desire to recover works that have been iconic for the formation of the collection, either due to the importance of the artists or because the works were produced for a museum exhibition, among them Maze, by Àngels Ribé; the gigantic MIT Projectby Matt Mullican; Self-portrait, by Jean-Michel Basquiat; None, by Joan Ponç; Maximum voracityThe harrowing video installation by the duo Dias & Riedweg about the hustlers of the Raval district, and a group of works by Esther Ferrer are also on display. Works by other iconic national and international artists from the collection are also featured, including Antoni Tàpies, Joan Miró, William Kentridge, and Joan Jonas. "Many come from funds that were instrumental in the formation of the MACBA collection, such as that of the gallerist Salvador Rivera," says Segura.

The famous doll Flamenco figure Tony Oursler's work opens the first of the five sections into which the exhibition is divided, To inhabit the borders, where the Raval neighborhood engages in dialogue with Manhattan through nightlife and the shared history of the AIDS pandemic, represented by "subversive identities," as the curator puts it, such as those of Ocaña, Josep Uclés, and Antonio Beneyto, the latter two previously unexhibited. And from the American context, Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and George Condo.

Judit Butler's theories on the body shape the scope To exist from the flesh,where there are often-ignored women artists from the Catalan context such as Amèlia Riera, Alicia Fingerhut and Sara Gibert, displayed around the Maze by Ribé. "The body makes you who you are; therefore, it has a performativity, it has a fundamental importance in your construction," Segura points out. Then, Vibrate in nature It reveals a mysterious creature by Tonet Amorós that appears surrounded by larvae, the small sculptures by Joan Miró that look like hybrids of different creatures, and the video by Joan Jonas. Volcano sagawhere Tilda Swinton embodies a feminine force that becomes a volcano.

A Other ways of organizing the world, he MIT Project Mullican's work takes flight once again. It has typically been interpreted in relation to minimalist sculpture, but for Segura, it reflects how we organize the world with images and what ideas we project onto them. An impressive video by Max de Esteban can also be seen here. Lamb of God, on genetic experiments in which human cells are implanted into animal organs to find out if, in the future, these animals' organs could be transplanted into humans.

Finally, delirium is a "generative force," as Segura says, in Get out of the furrow, where Tàpies and Ponç de Dau al Set are represented, those of the Ceremonials Conceptual works by Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Jaume Xifra, and Dorothée Selz, which were recorded by Benet Rossell. Also included are two mediumistic drawings by Josefa Tolrà and an animated video by William Kentridge. Ulisse: ECHO scan slide bottlewhich is a vindication of an "overflowing subjectivity."

Coinciding with the exhibition, a mural by the artist Clara Nubiola can also be seen in the museum's atrium, featuring "600 images that attempt to tell the story of the MACBA from a more human, more street-level perspective," as Dyangani explains. The phrases on the mural come from questions the institution posed on social media about what art, culture, the MACBA, a museum, or "what would you do if you were a museum director?" "It's a work full of humor and satire, and also a lot of poetry," the director concluded.