MACBA Celebrates 30 Years of Its Collection with Like a Dance of Starlings
- Redazione
- 1 day ago
- 2 min read
On the occasion of its thirtieth anniversary, MACBA presents Like a Dance of Starlings. MACBA Collection: Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being, an exhibition that offers a deep and unconventional rereading of the museum’s collection.
On view until 28 September 2026, the exhibition constructs a collective narrative that challenges the concepts of the individual and the community, fostering an open dialogue between artists from different generations, languages and cultural contexts.
Far removed from any chronological structure or celebratory intent, the exhibition brings together two hundred works by around fifty artists. Many of these are being shown at MACBA for the first time, while a significant number have entered the collection only recently. Curated by Clàudia Segura and Núria Montclús, the exhibition takes on a fluid, rhizomatic form inspired by the flight of starlings: unstable images, continuous transformations and relationships that form and dissolve, generating new constellations of meaning.
The exhibition opens with the black-and-white portraits from Fotomatón by Onofre Bachiller, produced between 1986 and 2000 in Barcelona’s nightlife venues. This extensive photographic archive portrays a city shaped by desire, fluid identities and social transformation, documenting the rise of club culture, LGBTQ+ communities and a nocturnal Barcelona that defies norms and hierarchies. The images function as a collective performance, a choral portrait of subjectivities in motion.
The exhibition unfolds across five thematic fields that explore contemporary processes of subject formation. In Inhabiting Borders, the works address identity as a porous and unstable construction shaped by gender, body, race and social class. Artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Ocaña and Tony Oursler challenge the notion of a unified subject, foregrounding liminal existences that have long been marginalised.
In Existing Through the Flesh, the body emerges as the primary site of experience and knowledge. Works by Àngels Ribé and others reveal identity as an embodied, performative and situated process, constantly shaped by its environment.
The journey then expands in Vibrating in Nature, where subjectivity is understood as a network of relationships connecting humans, the environment and spirituality. In works such as Sonhos Yanomami by Claudia Andujar, human existence appears inseparable from the breath of the forest, part of a shared and sacred ecosystem.
MACBA
Plaça dels Àngels, 1, Ciutat Vella, 08001 Barcelona
Fino al 28 Settembre 2026
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