Those who cross the Meier building next year will find a Macba “more critical, more eco-feminist, more social and more participatory”, according to the director of the museum, Elvira Dyangani Ose, who yesterday presented her new program for the 2024 coinciding with the opening of 108 days, a proposal by the Algerian artist Lydia Ourahmane for which a hundred people and groups will occupy the museum tower during the 108 days that the exhibition will last. A Macba, therefore, that also wants to be more collaborative and permeable and that opens the doors to the “social landscape” of the artist, resident in Barcelona since 2021, to see what it is that “this social landscape that she has met can say about ourselves and how this Barcelona can be transferred to the exhibition halls”, argues Dyangani Ose.
Moving towards this possible Museum that the director conceives as a “transformative project, which has an effect on people and society, to make it freer and to foster a critical spirit”, the 2024 program also means a turn of 180 degrees towards the local scene, with three large monographic exhibitions dedicated to the Catalans Jordi Colomer (the curator will be Martí Peran and will be there from May to September), Mari Chordà (from July to January, in charge of Teresa Grandas) and the Madrid native Teresa Solar, one of the most outstanding presences at the last Venice Biennale (from October to February, in a co-production with the Madrid CA2M whose curators are Claudia Segura and Tania Pardo).
Barcelona itself, seen from the neighborhoods that emerged from the post-war migration wave, will be the protagonist of an ambitious photographic project curated by Jorge Ribalta that crosses the entire periphery, from Besòs to the Marina, passing through Carmel or Turó de la Rovira, through the eyes of thirteen photographers, including Laia Abril, Jeff Wall, José Luis Guerín, Pedro G. Romero, Gregori Civera, Bleda
Although it is small in format, the first exhibition of the year will arrive on March 1 (until June 26) by the curator, poet and art critic Juan Bufill, who will offer a retrospective look, and in first person, in the historic Visual magazine (1977-1978), which for a short but fruitful period of time published the collective FIV (Film Video Information), of which Bufill himself was part together with Eugènia Balcells, Eugeni Bonet , Carles Hac Mor, Manuel Huerga, Ignacio Julià and Luis Serra. Beyond the material referring to the publication, the exhibition will incorporate visual works and experimental cinema made by some of its protagonists.
The international participation will be given by the American trans filmmaker and performer Wu Tsang (Worcester, 1982) who, in collaboration with TAB 21 and within the Grec, will present Carmen, a review of the multiple meanings around the protagonist of the Bizet’s opera (“a symbol of freedom and at the same time a conduit for misogyny”) through a film filmed in Seville starring Rocío Molina, Vanessa Montoya and Yinka Esi Graves.
The presentation of the collection will also be transformed over the months, with new additions, and halfway between public program and exhibition, María Berrios, the museum’s director of conservation and research, and Sabel Gavaldón, its new head of programs, will develop two projects, Song for many movements. Scenarios of collective creation and [against] panorama, which will activate the museum atrium as a meeting point and dialogue.
The museum, which has received 208,000 visitors so far, 10% more than in 2022, will have a budget of 13,025,070 euros, of which 1.9 come from own income, and the rest from contributions from the administrations that are part of the consortium. Of this amount, 1.9 are allocated to programming, while 5.7 are for personnel expenses, and 3.6 for building maintenance.
