Abstraction, performativity and memory/amnesia

On the occasion of International Museum Day, we are presenting the MACBA Manual, a publication in which artworks, artists, ideas, places and dates form a conceptual framework that defines the museum’s identity. The entries corresponding to works from the museum’s collection analyse them and put them in a specific context and the particular conditions under which they were produced, and thus go beyond the paradigms of interpretation and representation. The concepts analysed permeate the museum’s programming and are fundamental to the construction of MACBA as a critical space. On the occasion of this presentation, three round tables will be held in which the book’s very purpose, its combination of concepts, artists and works, is put into play. To this end, we have invited artists and thinkers who contributed to the publication and who, through their work and complicity, form an indispensable part of the MACBA, to discuss the concepts of abstraction, performativity and memory/amnesia, as examples of the diverse nature of the concepts that make up the publication and that refer to practices, ways of doing, policies and poetics.

With Ferran Barenblit, Tanya Barson, Pablo Martínez, Melanie Smith, Leonor Antunes, Maite Garbayo, Itziar Okariz, Dora García, Germán Labrador, María Ruido and Marcelo Expósito.