Francesc Abad, Comptar i numerar les pigues d’una part del braç per part dels assistents, 1973/1992/2026
 
In the early 1970s, Francesc Abad was part of the generation of Catalan artists who opted for Conceptual and Action strategies as a way of taking art back to ground zero. On 1 December 1973, as part of the exhibition Terrassa. Informació d’Art, presented at the Institut Industrial in Terrassa, together with the Grup de Treball, he invited the public to perform an intervention on his own body. As the title indicates, Counting and Numbering the Freckles on a Part of the Arm by the Attendees documents this participatory action that claims chance and the ephemeral element as drivers of artistic practice.

Jordi Mitjà, Retrat de l’artista adolescent (amb ull de vellut), 1991/2026
 
Following a brawl the night before, Jordi Mitjà took a portrait of himself displaying its effects. It was 1991, when this artist from the Empordà was still studying and experimenting. Although the title of this photograph references the famous book by James Joyce that was staple reading for teenagers in the 1980s, Mitjà associates this image with the festive and effervescent attitude of the art scene at the time, with irreverent figures such as Martin Kippenberger. An artist who works with appropriation, during the 1990s Mitjà explored the limits of what can and cannot be done within artistic practice.

Dates: from 14 September to 30 November 2026

Venue: Centre Cívic de Can Gili (Camí Vell de Lliçà d’Amunt, 1, 08403 Granollers). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Museu de Granollers i Roca Umbert. Fàbrica de les Arts

Martha Rosler, Flower Fields, 1974 
 
One of Martha Rosler’s earliest films, Flower Fields, made in the 1970s, anticipates this pioneer artist’s interests in using video as a tool for social analysis with a clear feminist commitment. In its apparent simplicity, Rosler reminds us that social oppression, mixed up with issues of gender and class, lurks in everyday life. In this case, Rosler films, from inside her car, the flower fields next to a hilly landscape alongside US Highway 5, which follows the Pacific coast from Mexico to Canada. While the long shots with idyllic images evoke the Western pictorial tradition, the presence of an immigration police car driving at great speed along the highway offers glimpses of what is hidden beneath the beauty of the flower fields: the harsh working conditions of the illegal Mexican workers employed there. Recorded in 1974, the piece ends with images of border police checkpoints. It is one of Rosler’s few works shot on Super-8.

Dates: from 19 June to 31 July 2026

Venue: Enric Pintado dental centre (carrer de Sant Joan Baptista de la Salle, 7, 08241, Manresa). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Centre Cultural el Casino

Jana Sterback, Cones on Fingers, 1979 (1995)/2026
 
Cones on Fingers is an early work by Jana Sterback, an artist who investigates our relationship with the body and how it is marked by what is culturally and socially expected of us. While in other works she builds physical prostheses and artefacts that could be worn, or dresses made from raw meat, in this work from 1979 she rolls up five measuring tapes and wears them on each finger of her left hand. An elegant hand with slender fingers, contrasting with their dysfunctionality – they are totally useless. In her works, Jana Sterback addresses the limits of the body as well as the constant aesthetic dictates of fashion.

Dates: from 25 August to 30 November 2026

Venue: Centre Ungles & Estética (carrer de Sant Josep, 17 bis, 08302 Mataró). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: M|A|C Mataró Art Contemporani

Gary Hill, Commentary, 1980 
 
Gary Hill is known for his exploration of the relationship between words and electronic images. By the 1970s, he was already interested in the nature of television, linguistics and consciousness from a philosophical and often poetic perspective. Commentary, from 1980, is one of his earlier video works. With a machine-like diction, the artist recites a monologue about the nature of television, while the camera focuses in close-up on parts of his body involved in communication, such as the lips, ears, hands and vocal cords. While Hill replicates the intensity and speed of television images, the slowness of his voice and the way the fragmented image opposes the norms of video clips used in television, implies a critique of the medium. As in other works, Hill uses the ‘murmured commentary’ or ‘commentary as soundtrack’, a resource in which sound acts as an element of the installation, at times incomprehensible yet with an immersive effect.

Dates: from 1 October to 30 November 2026

Venue: Cinema Catalunya (carre de Sant Pere, 9, 08221 Terrassa). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Sala Muncunill

Vito Acconci, Three Frames Studies, 1969-1970
 
Provocative and often radical, the renowned artistic practices of the North-American artist Vito Acconci evolved from early poetry to Conceptual art, from voice work to full-body actions and performance, from super-8 cinema to video. An evolution that reached its zenith in the late sixties and seventies, when he produced a set of works that experimented with his own body and the bodies of others based on minimal movements such as rubbing, opening, stretching and other displacements, but also on the relationship of the body to the camera. This is the case with Three Frames Studies, from 1969-70, one of his earlier films, in which Acconci performs a series of actions such as running in circles, jumping or pushing a partner, taking account of the fact that the physical limits of the action also refer to the limits of the film frame itself. Three framing studies that allow him to establish a dialogue between the artist and the viewer, while erasing the boundaries between artistic object and shared experience.

Dates: from mid-September to 30 November 2026

Venue: Club Natació Sabadell Can Llong (carrer Budapest, 1. 08206, Sabadell). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Museu d’Art de Sabadell

Ana Muller, Sant Just Desvern, 2007/2026
 
In the 1960s, when there were hardly any female photographers specialising in architecture, Ana Muller decided to dedicate herself to this photographic genre. Since then, she has documented everything from the construction of emblematic buildings like the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao to processes of urban regeneration such as those that have taken place in the Barcelona metropolitan area. Commissioned by MACBA, between April and October 2007 Muller photographed the city’s suburban neighbourhoods. She chose to document the horizontal construction of the upper-middle-class neighbourhoods of Sant Just Desvern and Sant Quirze del Vallès. Her black-and-white series captures the diffuse city with its sprawling urbanism, with rows of semi-detached houses far from the city centre. With a carefully calculated framing that draws on her background in architectural photography, she opts for humble, everyday moments, capturing exteriors that allow us to understand interiors.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, 1974
 
In 1970s New York, faced with a lack of workspaces, many artists occupied abandoned industrial buildings in Lower Manhattan. Gordon Matta-Clark was one of them. But what initially stemmed from necessity soon evolved into a creative language and a form of activism that was critical of the capitalist use of architecture and of the myth of the American way of life, against which he defended a collective use of space. This artist, trained in architecture, began practising what he called building cuts. Documenting abandoned buildings, he intervened with a saw, hollowing out or sectioning geometric figures in the walls or floors, or splitting the buildings in half, as in this work. In Splitting, the artist literally sliced through the middle a typical middle class suburban house located on the outskirts of Englewood, New Jersey. In just eight years, from 1970 to 1978, Matta-Clark created a radical and innovative artistic body of work (which he and others associated with him called anarchitecture) that has influenced subsequent generations of architects and visual artists. 

Dates: to be confirmed

Venue: Tarragona City Police Station (carrer del Arquebisbe Josep Pont i Gol, 8, 43005 Tarragona). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Mèdol – Centre d’Arts Contemporànies de Tarragona

Xavier Ribas, Sin título (Campo de fútbol). Serie: «Domingos», 1994-1997/2026
 
The photographs in the Sundays series, such as this football stadium captured in the mid-1990s somewhere in Catalonia, condense Xavier Ribas’ interest in tracing contemporary living habits. This renowned Barcelona photographer has carried out various works on the city, focusing especially on the idea of the periphery. Made between 1994 and 1997, Sundays is one of his best-known series. Ribas recorded industrial estates, wastelands and residual areas of metropolitan Barcelona that had spontaneously been converted into weekend leisure spots, with families on picnics, children playing, adults taking a nap, reading or simply resting. In an often-exclusive urban logic and a way of understanding leisure as an organised activity, it is the inhabitants who, with all the creative force of human communities, re-signify spaces that are not yet codified.
 
Dates: from 19 June to 30 November 2026

Venue: Complex Esportiu Municipal d’Alella (carrer de Pau Vila, 5, 08328, Alella). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Espai d’Art i Creació Can Manyé

Fina Miralles, Translacions. Herba flotant al mar [Documentació de l’acció realitzada el novembre de 1973 a Premià de Mar, Espanya] , 1973 (1992)/2026
 
The dialogue with the earth, the sea and the rhythms of nature runs through all of Fina Miralles’ work, from her first actions, in the early 1970s, to her last in 2020. One of the pioneering artists of Action art in Catalonia, Translacions is one of her best-known works. It is a set of actions carried out in November 1973 in which Miralles planted the lower half of her body in the ground as if she were a tree, moved sand from the beach to the middle of a field and made sods of grass float on the surface of the sea. In this last action, as documented in these photographs, Miralles transported to the beach of Premià de Mar a set of 40 x 40 cm turf sods that had been planted in Sabadell. They were dragged out to sea by boat, where they floated for about three hours.

Dates: from 7 July to 25 September 2026

Venue: Espai Jove la Nau (carrer de Baltà de Cela, 45-47, 08720 Vilafranca del Penedès). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Sala dels Trinitaris

Iván Argote, Caricia, 2012 
 
Taking the city as a field of action, Colombian artist Iván Argote infiltrates everyday urban life to activate encounters and raise questions about our relationship with others. Caricia is an example in point. As in many of his works, Argote places the action in the public space. In 2012, the artist recorded lovers in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. In a video of just over three minutes, the shadow of the photographer caresses the couple’s bodies, while they caress each other. Caress upon caress. An intrusive, yet tender contact that participates, anonymously, in their intimacy. An activist for contact and relationships, Argote’s artistic practice activates spaces as meeting points with others and as a way of exploring the joy of sharing. With a certain humour, he explores other relational dynamics to open up a whole world of possibilities and trace new horizons of meaning.

Venues:
– Auqué Pharmacy, from 19 June to 3 July (carrer Sant Antoni, 11, 08440 Cardedeu). Check times and directions.
– Palou Pharmacy, from 3 July to 17 July (carrer de la Mare de Déu del Pilar, 124C, 08440 Cardedeu). Check times and directions.
– Amat Pharmacy, from 31 July to 13 August (carrer de la Mare de Déu del Pilar, 34, 08440 Cardedeu). Check times and directions.
– Ferrer Alibés Pharmacy, from 4 September to 18 September (Diagonal Fiveller, 8, 08440 Cardedeu). Check times and directions.
– Llongueras Pharmacy, from 18 September to 2 October (carretera Dosrius, 90, 08440 Cardedeu). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Museu Arxiu Tomàs Balvey

Jana Sterback, Cones on Fingers, 1979 (1995)/2026
 
Cones on Fingers is an early work by Jana Sterback, an artist who investigates our relationship with the body and how it is marked by what is culturally and socially expected of us. While in other works she builds physical prostheses and artefacts that could be worn, or dresses made from raw meat, in this work from 1979 she rolls up five measuring tapes and wears them on each finger of her left hand. An elegant hand with slender fingers, contrasting with their dysfunctionality – they are totally useless. In her works, Jana Sterback addresses the limits of the body as well as the constant aesthetic dictates of fashion.

Dates: from 19 June to 23 August 2026

Venue: Hache Ungles (carrer de la Riera, 37, 08302 Mataró). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: M|A|C Mataró Art Contemporani

Pepe Espaliú, Vídeo de l’acció “El nido” (Arnhem, Holanda), 1993  
 
In the summer of 1993, Pepe Espaliú performed the action El nido at the Sonsbeek Festival in Arnhem, the Netherlands. The artist built a small wooden platform around the trunk of a tree, as a kind of nesting area. The action consisted of walking in circles on the platform for eight days, taking off one piece of clothing each day, leaving the garments successively on the ground. On the final day, he walked naked. It was one of the last works by Espaliú, an artist who, having been diagnosed with AIDS in New York three years earlier, chose to visualise his struggle against the virus and its social stigmatisation through his art. The action is further related to the more spiritual side of Espaliú’s work and his interest in the dances of the whirling dervishes, who spin endlessly around the vertical axis of their own bodies, achieving a kind of hypnotic, mystical state.

Dates: to be confirmed
 
Venue: Hospital General de Mollet del Vallès (Ronda dels Pinetons, 6, 08100 Mollet del Vallès). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Fundació Municipal Joan Abelló

Marc Vives, Es que ahora no puedo (II), 2020
 
In March 2018, Marc Vives began the self-imposed routine of swimming every day to explore the side of Barcelona’s Montjuïc mountain that faces the sea. With a camera attached to his head, and singing and making sounds while swimming, he compiled images, audios and other material in order to capture his impressions of the mountain. Later, when exhibiting the work, the artist welcomed small groups of people into the gallery to share his experiences in a series of private performances. With all this material, including the recordings from the sea and his songs during the performances, Vives produced Es que ahora no puedo, a work in the manner of a calendar or diary of moments lived in the sea. Together, this set of photographs and videos reclaims the sea as a creative space and singing as a practice derived from the gaze of the swimmer.

Dates: from mid-September to 30 November 2026.

Venue: Institut Ticeris (carrer Joan Fuster i Ortells, 45, 17840 Sarrià de Ter). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Sala Dolors Xabé

Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Dios bárbaro o Dieu dont de l’eau sort de la bouche. Sèrie: “Déus”, núm. 9, 1981/2026  
Ferran Garcia Sevilla, Deu aliorum o god wanted. Sèrie: “Déus”, núm. 22, 1981/2026 
 
The Déus series, made up of sixty acrylics on canvas, corresponds to a moment, in 1981, when Ferran Garcia Sevilla incorporated pictorial production into the conceptual practice that he had been developing since the 1970s. Déus is a variation on the unitary theme that gives the series its title. All the paintings are the same format, made in black and white and populated with symbols and figures that allude to the artist’s interests, such as violence, sex and love. Through a metamorphic divinity that adopts multiple forms, Garcia Sevilla incorporates iconography from different cultures, religions and pictorial practices, and uses different languages ​​to designate the divinities.

Dates: from 19 June to 30 November 2026

Venue: Martorell Urban Bus Line (LU). Check schedules and routes. Directions.

Collaborating centre: Muxart, Espai d’Art i Creació Contemporanis

Anònim, Exposicions de Joan Brossa a Espanya: a l’Acadèmia de Belles Arts de Sabadell amb amics, 1981/2026

This anonymous photograph corresponds to the exhibition of Joan Brossa held at the Acadèmia de Belles Arts in Sabadell in June 1981. Titled Joan Brossa. Poesia visual i poemes objecte (Joan Brossa. Visual Poetry and Object Poems) and curated by Vicenç Altaió, it showed the most prominent creative line in which the poet and visual artist was working at that time. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Brossa maintained a close cultural and exhibiting relationship with the town of Sabadell, which was then committed to the artistic avant-garde through collectives, art galleries and academies. As can be seen in the image, it is Brossa himself who holds up one of the works in the exhibition with a group of friends: a visual poem that shows a bold typographic X, one of the last letters of the alphabet and a sign of elimination or criticism, as well as one of Brossa’s iconic symbols. It could be Poema visual amb una X gran (Visual Poem with a Large X), from 1975. The complicity and festive irreverence of the group that appears in this image is undeniable: Joan Brossa accompanied by Benet Ferrer, Alfons Borrell, Lluis Permanyer and Perejaume.
 
Dates: from mid-September to 30 November 2026

Venue: Mala Peça (carrer del Doctor Puig, 14, 08202 Sabadell). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Museu d’Art de Sabadell

Miralda, Santa comida = Holy food. New York: Museo del Barrio, 1985

In December 1984, Miralda presented the installation Santa Comida (Holy Food) at the Museo del Barrio in New York. The result was a work of large dimensions and symbolic scope on the legacy of African cultures that, through slavery, had been brought to America.

The Yoruba culture, originally from the Gulf of Benin on the west coast of Africa, has kept its beliefs over the several generations that arrived in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Central America and the United States through its assimilation with the Catholic saints. A phenomenon of syncretism that lies at the origin of the so-called Santeria, which unites cuisine and religion. Much of the survival of the Yoruba culture has to do with the festive ritual around food, in which each Orisha god is offered the foods corresponding to their individual attributes. Based on this premise, Miralda built seven altars dedicated to the most prominent Orisha deities, with food products and objects of worship linked to each one of them. The Holy Food book traces the origins and geographical movements of a series of food products, showing their routes.

Dates: from 26 June to 26 July 2026

Venue: Mercat del Centre (plaça de Soler i Carbonell, s/n, 08800 Vilanova i la Geltrú). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Centre d’Art Contemporani La Sala

Manel Armengol, Obrers en un míting, 1977/2026

Obrers en un míting, from 1977, is one of the photographs of the workers’ rallies and social struggles that Manel Armengol captured during the years of the Spanish Transition. This photographer from Badalona was an internationally renowned photojournalist. While the Spanish media refused to publish his images for fear of censorship, they were lauded on the international stage. One such example is the photograph of a police charge against a pacifist demonstration in 1976, which was seen around the world after being published by Paris Match, Le Nouvel Observateur, Der Spiegel and The New York Times. Obrers en un míting was taken in Barcelona during the workers’ rallies and meetings that marked the transition to democracy.

Dates: pendientes de confirmación

Venue: Palau Municipal (plaça del Mercadal, 1, 43201 Reus). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Centre d’Art Cal Massó

Allan Sekula, Life Preserver, Sestao Knutsen. Sèrie: «Methane for All», 2008/2026
 
In 2007, the North-American photographer Allan Sekula documented the arrival at the Barcelona harbour of ships carrying methane. Built in the north of Spain, the ships transport this dangerous substance from the gas fields of Qatar, Libya and Algeria. Sekula photographed them from either the prow or the stern, the only two places where it is allowed for reasons of security, since a mere click of the shutter could generate a sparkle of static electricity and cause an accident. He photographed the workers, as well as details and the ships themselves, together with the port terminal for inflammable substances, where the gas is transported via submarine conducts to the Besòs power plant, owned by Gas Natural. Sekula’s interest lies in the globalisation of commerce and its impact on contemporary life. With a practice of documentary and social critique photography, part of his work focuses on the sea as a stage where the international traffic of large multinational corporations unfolds the ruthless logic of capital.

Carmen Secanella, Camí de l’Esparver, 2022-2023/2026
  
The Marina neighbourhoods of Barcelona, ​​located in the Sants-Montjuïc district and traditionally known as Zona Franca, are undergoing a profound urban, social and human transformation, characterised by the relatively anarchic coexistence of multiple uses and activities. The changes in the area are among the most dynamic and radical of all those currently taking place in Barcelona since the start of the present century. And yet, it is a process that has been largely ignored and underrepresented, something that Carmen Secanella’s photographic work seeks to rectify. Presented in various photographic series created between 2022 and 2023, this Barcelona-based photographer captures some of the contradictions of these neighbourhoods. Included in the series, are Secanella’s images of the Camí de l’Esparver, a historical and natural route that runs along the Montjuïc mountain. A traditional medicinal herb path, now a health trail, it connects the Marina del Port area with the upper part of the mountain, near the Fossar de la Pedrera.

Jordi Benito, Transformación del hielo en agua mediante el calor del cuerpo, 1972/2026 

This is one of the first actions performed by the artist Jordi Benito, who, between 1971 and 1972, experimented with his body in relation to the physical environment. These very simple actions sometimes tested the physical resistance of the body and at others, as in this case, interacted with the elements. Transformation of Ice into Water through Body Heat is one of the three pieces that Benito showed in the group exhibition Transformacions in October 1972, one of the earliest examples of Action art in Catalonia. Three pieces that he called Experiències i Transformacions (Experiences and Transformations) and that consisted of different ideas for experimenting with materials based on simple body actions such as heating, blowing, wetting or manipulating. In addition to taking an ice cube and heating it in his hands until it melted, Benito also blew away a cigarette paper and crumbled a lump of dry clay, mixed it with water and moulded it.

Dates: from mid-September to 30 November 2026

Venues:
– Avenida de Girona bus stop – carrer de Lleida (08130 Santa Perpètua de Mogoda). Directions
– Rotonda de la Font bus stop (08130 Santa Perpètua de Mogoda). Directions
– Rotonda de La Llagosta bus stop (08130 Santa Perpètua de Mogoda). Directions

Collaborating centre: Granja Soldevila

Francesc Abad, Davant / Darrere – Posició normal / posició anormal, 1972/1992/2026
 
In the early 1970s, Francesc Abad was part of the generation of Catalan artists who opted for Conceptual and Action strategies as a way of taking art back to ground zero. A set of plural practices that prioritised the idea and the process over the object. From this premise, Abad performed a series of bodily actions such as the two presented here. In 1972, in Davant / Darrere – Posició normal / posició anormal he photographically documented the different angles of the artist’s own head, emulating a classic treatise on composition, but also police mug shots.

Dates: from 19 June to 30 November 2026

Venue: Hermes Hair Salon (carretera de Montblanc, 2, 43800 Valls). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Museu de Valls

Onofre Bachiller, Fotomaton, 1986-2000/2026 
 
Planned as a photographic performance of social prospection, Onofre Bachiller placed a camera at different points in Barcelona: a bar in the Raval, a cultural centre in El Born, a gay bar in the Eixample… The photographer set up a tripod, a background and a flash, giving the shutter release to anyone wanting to take a spontaneous self-portrait. Made between 1986 and 2000, the result is a visual compendium (more than 3,000 images) of the nineties, in the broadest sense, before the arrival of digital photography. A project of ‘photo-donors’, as the photographer explains with three premises: ‘the images must be like snap-shots, the objective of the photo is its author, not the set.’

Dates: from 19 June to 30 November 2026

Venue: Sonia Buisán Hair Salon (carretera del Pla, 6, 43800 Valls). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Museu de Valls

Josep Ponsatí, Eivissa, 1971

Josep Ponsatí is known for his inflatable sculptures, monumental and ephemeral aerial structures built from linked modular forms. After a first inflatable erected in Granollers, in October 1971 he launched a second one in Cala Sant Miquel in Ibiza during the meeting of designers at the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). It was made up of 12 white, plastic modules with a slightly curved shape. Each module measured 11 x 3.5 metres, with a total length of 41 metres. Combining the fragility and modesty of poor materials with the repetitive structures of Minimalism, these inflatable sculptures also evoke the ritual and participation of all those who collaborated in the project.

Dates: from October to 30 November 2026

Venue: Lleida Funeral Home (Camí Municipal de Montcada, s/n, 25196 Lleida). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Centre d’Art La Panera

Bruce Nauman, Art Make-Up, 1 967-1968
 
Like other artists of his generation, the American Bruce Nauman rejects the traditional idea of ​​the work of art as an independent object, advocating instead an art created from the experience of his own body. In the late 1960s, he began a series of works in which he performed different activities in front of a fixed camera, transforming into art the corporeality of the artist and his experience and manipulation in real time. It is in this innovative context that, in 1967 and 1968, Nauman recorded Art Make-up, a project made up of four related films in which he applies different shades of makeup to his face and torso. Called White, Pink, Green and Black, the artist diligently masks himself until he blurs his own identity. By erasing himself, both metaphorically and literally, Nauman explores what he calls ‘withdrawal as a form of art’.

Dates: from 19 June to 31 July 2026

Venue: Tien 21 (carrer de Santa Eugènia, 106, 17006 Girona). Check times and directions.

Collaborating centre: Bòlit, Centre d’Art Contemporani