Collectable

Initiating a DEBATE. Week of 8 March

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

work
Guerrilla Girls (Grup d'artistes)

Pop Quiz

There are numerous works in the MACBA Collection that encourage debate, open speech, the sum of imaginaries and the defence of plurality. And they do it by asking innovative questions, making unexpected gestures or projecting voices that are still silenced today. Some ask pertinent questions, like the legendary Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?, the slogan used by the Guerrilla Girls collective to protest outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1989. Others evoke impositions, like The Human Voice, 1997, a video-action by the artist and researcher María Ruido in which she tries to read feminist texts with her mouth covered. Some, like the famous Semiotics of the Kitchen, 1975, by Martha Rosler, let kitchen utensils talk in the name of women. While still others bring into the Museum the communal radios of rural parts of Mozambique. This is what Angela Ferreira does in Talk Tower for Forough Farrokhzad, 2020, in which she recites poems by the Iranian filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad (1935–1967), censored for many years and a necessary symbol of present-day Iran. You can explore the feminist works in the MACBA Collection by following the itineraries shared here.