Summer exhibitions

This summer, the MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona will unveil three new exhibitions and present a refreshed display of its permanent collection. The program will be rounded off by Jordi Colomer’s retrospective Façana Foto Festa Futur Fideus.

Unknown City Beneath the Mist. New images from Barcelona’s Peripheries traces an uncommon route through present-day Barcelona via thirteen commissions that offer a relatively unknown image of the city, from the viewpoint of several historical inner cities that are both emblematic and far removed from the most common places in mainstream representations. The ensemble contributes to renewing the city’s image, leaving aside the clichés of exclusion and the diffuse urban condition typical of a periphery that no longer exists. The exhibition is organised as a geographical and historical journey through this new emerging city.

Artists: Laia Abril, Bleda y Rosa, Gregori Civera, Gilbert Fastenaekens / Brigitte Van Minnenbruggen, Raquel Friera / Creadoness Textil, José Luis Guerin, Manolo Laguillo, Pilar Monsell, Mabel Palacín, Pedro G. Romero, Martha Rosler, Carmen Secanella, Jeff Wall, Jorge Yeregui.

Exhibition produced in collaboration with Fomento de Ciudad SA and the Barcelona Institute of Culture as part of the 2021–24 Barcelona City Council’s Neighbourhood Plan.

Mari Chordà … And Many Other Things. Image, language and social action are the foundations of the work of Mari Chordà (Amposta, 1942) and an integral part of her life: the artist, the writer and poet, and the activist form an unbreakable bond and a basis for an attitude and convictions that make up the backbone of her work and biography. As well as being an active, attentive observer of the reality around her, she takes part in it, shaking up and subverting everything she sees, guided by a political stance that emerged as a response to the Francoist dictatorship and endured in the form of feminist struggles for the visibility and recognition of women’s work.

By championing pleasure, delight and celebration as spaces of artistic, sexual and political dissidence, she helps to break down the established moral, cultural and social order. Chordà advocates for culture and the local, as well as connection to her roots, which she views as a way of life and resistance. Painting, writing, acting, taking a stand, organising collectively and denouncing what she believes is not right—as she has done publicly on several occasions – are her ways of dealing with the urgent matters of her time.

Exhibition coproduced by MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and the Museu d’Art Modern de la Diputació de Tarragona.

MACBA’s Capella will host the world premiere of Wu Tsang’s La gran mentira de la Muerte (The big lie of death), a multichannel sound and film installation conceived as a site-specific work. It explores poetic themes of Carmen, particularly as her myth is entangled with the performative fields of flamenco and bullfighting. Like the opera composed by Georges Bizet, these fields evoke the spectacle of death and implicate the spectator as a part of it. This work brings the ritual performance of death (real and imagined) into a conversation with cinema, which bears its own murderous traditions.  

Different subalternities run through Carmen: colonial, racial, gender, class and criminality. All of them make Carmen an image of western otherness and, at the same time, she embodies one of its great stereotypes. Going further, the collision of all these subalternities displaces her beyond identity, and sets in motion the tragic destiny of the myth.  

Work coproduced by TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Hartwig Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Victoria. With the collaboration of MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Research and development commissioned by TBA21, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary. Generously supported by CAAC, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo and Excelentísimo Ayuntamiento de Guillena (Sevilla).