Lydia Ourahmane: 108 Days

As MACBA inaugurates a new season, over one hundred individuals and collectives from a cross-section of Barcelona’s social spectrum will occupy the tower of the Meier building in a project that confronts the Museum’s modus operandi.

Inhabiting, gathering, sharing, being permeable…, these are all qualities that infuse the site-specific project 108 Days by Lydia Ourahmane (Saïda, Algeria, 1992). The title refers both to the number of days the exhibition is open to the public and to the total of participants engaging with the space during this time.

108 Days brings an extended city context into the Museum by foregrounding individuals and collectives who form part of its social landscape and have been specifically chosen by Ourahmane, who has lived in Barcelona since 2021. The space will be occupied by what the participants consider urgent and incisive, with the aim of promoting critical dialogue and exchange with the space, the institutional framework and those who visit it. Like many of her projects, 108 Days relates to the artist’s immediate surroundings and engages with the social, political and experiential, while being rooted in personal histories and experiences, whether individual or collective. 

This work presents a significant alteration to the way the Museum normally operates, firstly by leaving the space empty, aside from a few essential elements, and secondly by interpreting the Museum’s commission by inviting 108 individual participants. The trust between the artist, the institution, those invited and the audience is what lends significance to the work. 

Ourahmane’s praxis poses the following questions: How can the institutional structures and parameters that define contemporary societies be defied? How can vigilance and the impositions of bureaucracy be overturned? How can artworks involve active and effective protests? Through these inquiries, Ourahmane brings the personal into the political field and the domestic into the field of history. 

Click here for the whole programme.

Listen to an interview with the artist on RWM here. 

Also included in the 2024 season at MACBA will be solo exhibitions dedicated to Jordi Colomer, Mari Chordà and Teresa Solar, the photographic project Archipelago: New Images of the Neighbourhoods of Barcelona, and the small-format exhibition dedicated to the former Visual magazine.

Halfway between public programme and exhibition, the projects Song for Many Movements: Scenes of Collective Creation and [contra]panorama will focus on the processes of agency and co-responsibility, asking what are the forms of collectivity, solidarity and infrastructural work that, historically and in the present, have generated the aesthetic, political, cultural and social forms that have come to underpin the institution.

In collaboration with TBA21, the Capella MACBA will be showing a film installation by Wu Tsang (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1982) on the theme of Bizet’s opera, Carmen, accompanied by a series of performances as part of the Grec Festival.

The metamorphosis of MACBA Collection: Prelude. Poetic Intention will continue with new dialogues and the incorporation of works by Ignasi Aballí, Mar Arza, Yamandú Canosa, Francesc Torres, Manolo Laguillo, Xavier Ribas and Antoni Tàpies. Later in the year, a further rehang will introduce works by Adrián Balseca, Katia Kameli, Danica Dakić, Younès Rahmoun, Dora García, Soledad Sevilla, Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel G. Andújar, Mireia Sallarès, Cabello/Carceller, Pepe Espaliú, Sinéad Spelman, Lucia Nogueira, Susy Gómez, Lola Lasurt, Helena Vinent, Leonora de Barros, Carmen Calvo and Charo Pradas, among others.