Volume!
Works from the Collections of “la Caixa” Foundation and MACBA
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)
Plaça dels Àngels, 1
08001 Barcelona
www.macba.cat
The Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) presents the first collaborative exhibition combining works from the Collection of “la Caixa” Foundation and the MACBA Collection, as a result of an agreement between “la Caixa” Foundation and the MACBA Foundation. Volume! proposes an itinerary running from the sculptural to the acoustic dimension. This itinerary, focused on the turn of the twentieth to twenty-first century, illustrates the consolidation of sound and voice as materials for artistic production. Noteworthy therein are a series of specific developments presented as individual and separate exhibitions which viewers shall come upon during their visit of the Collection. Such is the case in the chronological sections of the MACBA Collection, the recently acquired works by Muntadas, Šejla Kamerić and Anri Sala, and the revision of the work of Aleksandr Sokurov, which shall be open as of February 2012.
The new model is rooted in experimental projects that turn to the media of cinema and video, practices that favour a narrative language that gradually frees itself from the image. The origins of this transformation can be found in Dadaist phonetic poetry from the early twentieth century, and in the poésie sonore and Lettrist experiments that followed the Second World War. More recently, as well as the reflections of theoreticians such as Roland Barthes and Mladen Dolar, whose contributions steered the visual arts toward a sudden attention to sound, we have had the new technological possibilities for recording, altering and reproducing the voice. The relationship between voice and image, vocal experimentation, the inner voice and the voice of power, are some of the approximations to the human voice that can be found in this exhibition.
Echoing the formal and material innovations introduced by the historic avant-gardes in the early twentieth century, contemporary art has dethroned the eye as the hegemonic sense and reinstated auditory perception. The white cube, that ‘machine for looking’ associated to an idea of the museum as inherited from the past, is showing its age. The viewers have acquired a near-choreographic quality and outstripped its limits through a multiplicity of experiences. The three-dimensional nature of the Euclidean volume (from classical physics) has been replaced by the volume of sound and voice. This change in material has yielded radical changes in the perceptive system and in behaviour, so that, based on the convention dominated by what is visual, we can begin to narrate a history of art with a new multi-sensorial dimension.
The itinerary proposed by this exhibition puts forward a circular diagram that connects the different Museum levels. From a chronological point of view, the itinerary begins at Level 1, branching out from there in two directions: one leading from the visual space of painting and photography toward sculptural volume, further developed on Level 2; and another leading to acoustic volume, developed to a greater extent on Level 0.
Activities
21 November, 19 December and 19 January, at 7 pm
Special guided tours by Bartomeu Marí, curator of the exhibition and Director of MACBA, and Antònia Maria Perelló, Head of the MACBA Collection
(Exclusive to the Friends of MACBA)
Museum galleries. Limited places
Daily guided tours
(included in the admission fee)
Further information www.macba.cat
and Twitter
Opening times
Weekdays, 11 am to 7.30 pm
Saturdays, 10 am to 8 pm
Sundays and public holidays, 10 am to 3 pm
Closed Tuesdays (except public holidays)
Open Mondays
25 December and 1 January, closed
*Image above:
© Latifa Echakhch. Photo: Latifa Echakhch. Courtesy of the artist and kamel mennour, Paris.
