Barcelona Metropolis

Elvira Dyangani Ose opened her first exhibition in the MACBA collection in December 2022. After chronological exhibitions and other shows with a socio-political theme, the aim was to highlight, as the title itself suggests, the Poetic Intention of the works.

Do children have a political voice? Do we adults know what their demands are? Do politicians take them into account in their programmes? Colombian artist Iván Argote (Bogotá, 1983) has extensive experience in working with children: he himself is the son of two of the founders of the Cambio Social party and, later, of the Colombian Social Democratic Party, and since 2011 he has been running a protest workshop for children aged four to eight. So far, he has run the workshop over twenty times in more than a dozen cities in Europe, Africa, Latin America and the United States. The images and documents from the workshop he held in a French museum, brought together in an installation entitled Activissimme!!!, 2011-2013, are among the pieces featured in the new exhibition of MACBA’s permanent collection, entitled Poetic Intention. It is curated by the museum’s director, Elvira Dyangani Ose; the curator of the collection, Antònia Maria Perelló; and the curators Claudia Segura and Patricia Sorroche.

There are many more, including Updated, the installation by Pep Duran (Vilanova i la Geltrú, 1955) that seeks to break with inertia, because it blocks the visitor’s path and forces them to decide whether to step on the work or look for an alternative route to enter the rooms, and the well-known Ayuda humanitaria [Humanitarian Aid] by Núria Güell (Vidreres, Girona, 1981). The latter is a piece that was born out of her marriage to the Cuban who had written her the most beautiful love letter, so that he could acquire Spanish nationality. At MACBA, this work can be seen in the previously unseen format of a large installation that reproduces the dining room of a house. And Helicon, the video by Fito Conesa (Cartagena, 1980) in which seven musicians invoke the end of the world in an artificial lake created from the remains of mining activity in La Unión.

Núria Güell and Fito Conesa are two of the artists making their debut in an exhibition of the MACBA collection. Also making their debut are Bernat Daviu (Fonteta, Girona, 1985), with videos of dancers among paintings of tarasques, as Gerhard Richter and Sean Scully, Regina Giménez, Mirtha Dermisache, Kristina Kostadinova, Ángela de la Cruz, Ângela Ferreira, Magdalena Jitrik, Amalia Pica and Sandra Gamarra. Also featured are Zoe Leonard (New York, 1961) with a poem calling for a lesbian president for the United States, as well as Mar Arza, Concha Jerez and Elena del Rivero. New artworks can be seen by other artists who were previously part of the collection, such as Iván Argote himself, Dora García, Laia Estruch, The Otolith Group, Tres, Jorge Ribalta and Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958). The latter (Barcelona, 1958) takes centre stage, together with Regina Giménez (Barcelona, 1966), in another of the highlights of the exhibition: the installation Vitrines CMYK, where his minimalist hues engage in dialogue through colour with her cosmic canvases.