BARCELONA.- Black-and-white portraits depicting Barcelona nightlife in the last decade of the previous century line the corridor on the second floor of MACBA's Meier building. This is a selection of work from Fotomatón by Onofre Bachiller (Barcelona, 1959) that will accompany visitors to Like a Dance of Starlings. MACBA Collection: Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being, the new exhibition from the MACBA Collection.

Between 1986 and 2000, Bachiller placed a photo booth around lively nightlife spots in Barcelona. Hundreds of people had their photos taken alone or in groups in the middle of the night in a bar in Barcelona's Raval, in a gay club in the Eixample district, in a cultural centre in the Born neighbourhood... The result was a collection of 3,000 photographs depicting the advent of acid house, the drag queen parties organised by Susanne Bartsch across the city, the diversity of the streets and the emergence of the gay movement. Bachiller's work also shows the different identities and expressions of the people who took part, in what ends up being a photographic performance of social exploration. In this work, Bachiller captures the thousand and one faces of the debaucherous, nocturnal Barcelona that lives as it pleases, transgressing and laughing as it challenges the establishment.

The new proposal from the MACBA Collection invites reflection on subjectivity and its porous construction. Likewise, this perspective pays tribute to the Collection while also offering a critical review of the strands that have shaped the museum as it stands today. The exhibition, on display until 28 September 2026, comprises two hundred works by some fifty modern and contemporary artists. Curated by Clàudia Segura, Head of MACBA’s Collection, and Núria Montclús, MACBA’s curator, it is not a commemorative or chronological exhibition, but one with its own distinct identity.

Five fields that reflects the processes of contemporary subjectification

The exhibition's concept is inspired by the flight of starlings, creating volatile and changing images. Similarly, the works in the MACBA Collection are aligned and regrouped in their different presentations, mobilising one another and articulating new maps of meaning. The murmur also speaks to us of a chorus of voices, of a set of lives that intertwine and, from the collective, assert their own existence.
The show is structured around five fields that explore concepts about a subject understood as a malleable entity, whose identity is constructed not in isolation but collectively, in dialogue with collective experiences, social struggles and the contexts that underpin them.

Inhabiting Borders

Where do I end and something else begins? What does it mean to be here and now? Many artists have used art as a privileged space to explore their own existence, challenging the notion of the canonical modern subject.

From the insistent questioning by Tony Oursler’s Flamenco Figure (1994) to the in-depth interviews with male sex workers in the Raval neighbourhood in Barcelona conducted by Dias & Riedweg in Voracidad Máxima (2003), the works in this room tackle human subjectivity as a porous notion, crisscrossed by the sum of all our individual experiences. The interplay of different variables in life such as gender, body, race, social class and systems of knowledge gives rise to a plurality of coexisting selves, each with their own agency—“We each contain many more selves than we think”, as Bruno Latour might say.

Ocaña reaffirms his queer existence through performance and disguise; Jean-Michel Basquiat reflects on his African-American origins in his 1986 self-portrait; Luis Claramunt portrays an anonymous somebody, most likely from Barcelona’s Barrio Chino; and Josep Uclés draws us into the world of homoeroticism and the night. The multiple possibilities opened up by these visions of subjectivity embrace a range of liminal existences that inhabit a space beyond the “norm” and which have long been silenced and oppressed by hegemonic narratives. As what Chicana poet and activist Gloria Anzaldúa has called “borderland” or “mestiza” subjectivities, they highlight the fragmentary and transformative nature of contemporary experience, grounded in difference and indeterminacy, and stand as alternatives for being and inhabiting the world in a radically free way.

Existing Through the Flesh

Little by little, the boundaries of the rationalising dichotomy that historically sought to separate body and mind have become increasingly blurred. Far from being understood as an exclusively thinking substance, the self today is conceived as an embodied reality, rooted and present. We exist and feel through flesh; it is the body that connects us to the world. For Caribbean writer Rita Indiana, the body cannot be reduced to a symbol or an idea: it unfolds as living flesh, as a site of experience. In Àngels Ribé’s Labyrinthe (1969 [2025]), bodies articulate a subjectivity that expands inwards and outwards, desiring and relating to what is happening around them.

Thinking about the subject, then, also means rethinking ourselves from our most material dimension, and reclaiming it as a powerful formative tool. As Judith Butler has pointed out, the subject is not something one is, but something one does. Within this corporeal paradigm, several artistic practices in the Collection reveal the power of the body to leave an imprint of the subject in its many forms and variations. In all of them, it becomes clear that each body inhabits a specific place and context that shape its configuration. Existence becomes a situated practice, in constant transformation, its boundaries merging with its environment.

By listening to how a body helps construct the self, we can also explore ways of thinking about how to empower, protect or repair it, in order to enable an alternative, more pleasurable existence. Hence the appearance in art of all manner of prosthetic devices, armours and other artefacts which, as in Ramon Guillen-Balmes’s “Model d’ús” per a l’Eric and “Model d’ús” per a la Laura (1993), let us expand beyond our corporeal selves, with all their abilities and sensibilities, while celebrating the mutable and performative nature of our being.

Vibrating in Nature

A far cry from the autonomous individual of modernity, subjectivity today is understood as a network of relations, an open body where the biological, the technological, the symbolic and the spiritual converge. Nature is constantly making and remaking itself: rivers reshape their beds, fungi rebuild the soil, and trees communicate underground in an incessant network using a technology still ignored by Western eyes. Claudia Andujar’s Sonhos Yanomami (2002) shows how certain Indigenous communities see humans as inseparable from the breath of the forest—spirits and ancestors inhabit the mountains, animals and human bodies alike. Every being breathes the same air, and the air itself is sacred.

It is impossible to exist separately from the world: we take part in its continuous flow of creation, in its interspecies ways of being, in the generative mutations between different forms of life. We see this in Miró’s sculptures, which evoke a universe of energetic exchange between organisms, or in the transformations suggested by Rosario Zorraquín’s Oruguismo (2021), in dialogue with Joan Jonas’s Volcano Saga (1989), where Tilda Swinton embodies the feminine force become volcano. In this same spirit, Silvia Gubern’s sculptures evoke totems as portals to other dimensions, in the same way that Mazatec shaman María Sabina saw sacred mushrooms as a gateway to “see what is hidden” and as a means of communion with the word of the cosmos.

These works suggest subjectivities in communion whose existence expands beyond their visible skin and is conceived as an act of breathing with the surroundings.

Other Ways of Organising the World

Every community, every language and every technology organises the experience of reality by establishing hierarchies between the visible and the invisible, between what counts and what is discarded, between the conscious and the unconscious.

Today, subjectivity is far from being understood as pure self-awareness operating autonomously. We know that the field of consciousness is also the field of the visible, moulded by the dominant visual regime—the media, screens and discourses that define what deserves to be seen and what must remain hidden. As Marie-José Mondzain has said, we are images of images, bodies shaped by the reflections that surround us. Our mental images do not merely reflect reality; they produce it, distribute it, order it. Through them we learn what to look at, what to fear, what to desire. To order the world is, ultimately, to represent it—and every representation implies a use of power that sets boundaries. But what happens beyond the domain of this visual economy? Can absence become a place of latency that allows us to see things differently?

Suely Rolnik calls this space micropolitics: home to something vibrating, something that has not yet taken form but is already stirring, where the subject overwhelms its own representation. The unconscious—understood as an energy of the present, an underground current sustaining the desire for transformation—becomes a laboratory of new forms of existence. In M.I.T Project (1990–2009), Matt Mullican reflects on this way of organising the world through an extended meditation on the self; likewise, in their own fashion, A. R. Penck and Zush both confront us with the vulnerability of a being lost in a vast immensity, seeking the meaning of existence. From this perspective, subjectivity is not about destroying order, but transforming it through vibration, through spaces where the conscious and the unconscious meet. It means dismantling the rigid structures the West has used to order experience—reason over body, consciousness over instinct, the subject over the world.

Leaving the Furrow

The etymology of delirium, from the Latin delirare (“to leave the furrow” or “to stray from the marked path”) has an agricultural origin, describing the movement of a plough veering away from a straight line across the earth. Over time, this material sense became a metaphor for something deviating from the path of reason, crossing the boundaries of established mental order. Yet, as Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, delirious thought is not an anomaly but a fertile, transversal phenomenon—a form of intelligence which, in leaving the furrow, reveals other possible ways of understanding and producing reality.

It was modernity that stripped delirium of its status as a legitimate narrative and banished it as a forbidden and marginal discourse to the edges of what can be said about ideas such as desire, the body, death or power. This becomes evident in work by Joan Ponç, in pieces by Tàpies conjuring up the invocative spirit of the Dau al Set experimental age, and in the festive, ritual actions of the Cérémonials performed by the “Parisian Catalans”

(Miralda, Joan Rabascall and Jaume Xifra) together with Dorothée Selz at different sites around Paris and the area around Cologne, filmed by Benet Rossell. Delirium does not flee from the world; it breaks through and reimagines the limits of what the system deems to be thinkable. It may be linked to the visionary or mediumistic experience found in the works of Josefa Tolrà, where the figure of the medium acts not as a representative but as a conduit for channelling currents through her body, thus becoming a surface of passage, a kind of device connecting different planes, conscious and unconscious, human and nonhuman.

Delirium, then, appears in the works in this section not as an unproductive deviation but as an enriching force powering a journey of learning, inwards and outwards—as in William Kentridge’s voyage in Ulisse: ECHO scan slide bottle (1998), which takes critical swipes at the rationalism of modern medicine and medical institutions while rejecting the notion of a single meaning to create new possible worlds through an overwhelming subjectivity.

The exhibition includes recently acquired pieces and previously unseen works

Approximately half of the works on display share this trait. Among them is, for example, an artist's book by the recently deceased Zush.

On the other hand, 15% of the selected pieces are recent acquisitions, added to the MACBA Collection in the past three years. Examples include Sonhos Yanomami by Claudia Andujar, Oruguismo by Rosario Zorraquín, and Acciones Corporales from 2013 by Esther Ferrer from the MACBA Foundation.

Also shown is Elena Paredes' Untitled, from the National Collection of Post-War and Second Avant-Garde Art. The exhibition also features Julia Montilla's Serie detenida, which in this case comes from the National Photography Collection, and Mónica Planes' Cubierta abierta from the National Contemporary Art Collection. Also featured in the exhibition are works donated directly to the Consortium, such as Denis Oppenhiem's Feedback situation and the collection of Ramon Guillén-Balmes.

In addition, the exhibition features a significant number of pieces from the Salvador Riera collection, which was one of the first major additions to the MACBA Collection. These include Jean-Michel Basquiat's Self-Portrait, two paintings by Beneyto, one by Condo, Amelia Riera's Electrotermica n6, and a collection of previously unseen pieces by Josep Uclés, among others.

An archival space bearing witness to thirty years of the MACBA Collection

The exhibition includes an archival space where visitors will find all kinds of materials related to the MACBA Collection that has been produced and published over the last thirty years. Posters from exhibitions in the collection, handouts, publications, photographs of installations and exhibitions, audiovisual interviews and a series of FONDO AUDIO podcasts that articulate an oral, first-person account of the MACBA Collection through its artists and the contexts that surround them. It is a tribute to the Collection and to all the projects that have been developed around it.

‘Out from Reserve’. A Collaboration with the MACBA Education Department

The exhibition is complemented by three works located in three public educational establishments in the city: Escuela Jaume I, Escuela Segarra and Instituto Escola Mestre Morera.

Works by Alan Carrasco, Dora García and Tanit Plana are part of the new edition of ‘Out from Reserve’, a temporary programme in schools and colleges displaying works from MACBA’s contemporary art collection, in collaboration with Barcelona City Council.

Artists present in the exhibition

Tonet Amorós, Claudia Andujar, Miquel Arnal, Onofre Bachiller, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Samuel Beckett, Antonio Beneyto, Magda Bolumar, Joan Brossa, Vera Chaves Barcellos, Luis Claramunt, Francesco Clemente, George Condo, Modest Cuixart, Dau al Set, Mauricio Dias & Walter Riedweg, Max de Esteban, Esther Ferrer, Alicia Fingerhut, Peter Friedl, Sara Gibert, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Sílvia Gubern, Ramon Guillen-Balmes, Richard Hamilton, Joan Jonas, William Kentridge, Miralda, Joan Miró, Julia Montilla, Matt Mullican, Andrés Nagel, Ocaña, Itziar Okariz, Dennis Oppenheim, Tony Oursler, Elena Paredes, Anton Patiño, A. R. Penck, Mònica Planes, Joan Ponç, August Puig, Àngels Ribé, Amèlia Riera, Benet Rossell, Dieter Roth, Dorothée Selz, Josep Maria de Sucre, Antoni Tàpies, Josefa Tolrà, Josep Uclés, Moisès Villèlia, Jaume Xifra, Rosario Zorraquín and Zush.