Latest Events in Barcelona(March Updated)

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As part of the 30th anniversary celebrations of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona (MACBA), this new collection exhibition explores how a vibrant life form spreads its wings, transforming its subjectivity into a liberating space. The exhibition abandons traditional chronological narratives, instead re-examining the collection through dialogue with new modes of being and action. It presents a multifaceted perspective, reaffirming the collection as a constantly growing, open, diverse, and ever-changing whisper.

Curated by MACBA director Elvira Dyangani Ose, along with Antawan Byrd, Adom Getachew and Matthew S. Witkovsky, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica is the first major international exhibition to examine the cultural manifestations of Pan-Africanism from the 1920s to the present. It is a project developed jointly with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London and the KANAL–Centre Pompidou in Brussels. This collaboration has made the magnitude of the exhibition possible, with nearly 350 pieces by 100 artists touring the four institutions until spring 2027.

The artist José Luis Rey Vila (born in Cádiz in 1900, died in Paris in 1983), using the pen name Sim, left behind one of the most vivid testimonies to the Spanish Civil War, particularly the Battle of Barcelona. As part of a series of exhibitions and projects commemorating the war, the National Museum recently acquired and will exhibit nearly one hundred paintings created by the artist during the Civil War. These works are of exceptional quality and highly expressive, some depicting the brutality and cruelty of war, vividly portraying its horrific aspects.

This exhibition offers a multifaceted, open-to-interpretation narrative that reviews the key factors that motivated the founding of the Center for Contemporary Art Studies (CEAC). The exhibition will explore the circumstances and people who drove modernism in Catalonia, emphasizing the figure of Joan Prats, who was instrumental in the creation of the Fundació Joan Miró-CEAC. It will also reflect on the impact of the Civil War and Franco's regime, and the desire to recover the ideals of the modern movement of the 1920s and 1930s.

The first performance ofUbu Roi, by Alfred Jarry, in 1898, was a scandal. It dealt with an exaggerated and cruelly comic character that would later become a myth: “King of Poland, that is to say, from nowhere”, an “henorme” tyrant with greed, an infamous glutton and his “merdra”, which lets out all 6 letters from the first line. Thanks to this character, Jarry became famous at a very young age and even became a kind of celebrity. He adopted, in the most unforeseen circumstances, the role of Ubu with his accent, his extravagances, his manners, etc.

On the occasion of MACBA’s 30th anniversary, a new exhibition of the Collection will pay homage to the museum’s trajectory. A celebration of its three-decade-long history of critical engagement with the transformative potential of artistic production and research, the project acknowledges the collection as an embodied constellation of works that come to life and engage with each other differently amidst a radically altered cultural landscape, marked by migration, political resistance, and new forms of collectivity.

In *The Third Turning Point*, the artist uses the format of a road movie to document the current state of a nomadic settlement built by Bouffier in the Algerian Sahara Desert in 1979. This settlement was commissioned by then-President Hooari Boumediene. The building represents Bouffier's utopian period, when his studio (RBTA) brought together architects, poets, painters, and others. This complex, originally planned to be built to modern standards, was ultimately unfinished, revealing the tension between the dreams of that time and the realities of modern colonial heritage.

MACBA is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Spain by Palestinian art duo Basel Abbas (born 1983 in Nicosia, Cyprus) and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (born 1983 in Boston, USA). They employ poetic techniques of sound, image, text, and performance to delve into collective memory, exploring stories of oppression, deprivation, and violence, as well as narratives of collectivism and resilience.

The museum continues its series of projects themed around the civil war, such as the new permanent war gallery launched in 2021, and the "Museum Crisis!" exhibition focusing on the preservation of cultural artifacts during the conflict. Based on the museum's materials and related research, the National Museum of Catalonia (MNAC) will exhibit for the first time a selection of works from the Franco National Antiquities Preservation Agency (SDPAN). Founded in 1938, SDPAN's collection has been housed in this museum and other institutions, and its ownership remains a mystery.