Collectable

QUEER Imaginaries… in the Collection exhibition

The Collectables of the Year Thirty

Queer imaginaries are strongly present in the exhibition Like a Dance of Starlings. MACBA Collection — Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being. An exhibition on contemporary subjectivities in their political, poetic, performative, communal, spiritual and organic dimensions, it incorporates (as it could hardly do otherwise) a queer journey through its galleries. This is evident not only in the works on display, but also in the dialogues they establish with one another within the exhibition space. The curators have carefully listened to the affinities the works themselves seem to call for, such as the complicity invoked by the artists José Pérez Ocaña, Antonio Beneyto and Francesco Clemente in one of the exhibition’s galleries. While Beneyto, who like Ocaña lived in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter during the 1970s and 1980s, creates visual games that invoke the Dionysian world and the festive spirit of life, Ocaña reaffirms his free existence through performance and disguise. Nearby, and in a murmur that resonates across the space, Clemente offers his mutant beings as a refuge for the ever-changing self, perpetually in transit within Hindu philosophy. A phrasing, a back-and-forth dialogue, that grows in unexpected ways through our gaze.