Exhibition
From October 24, 2024 to April 21, 2025

Epilogue

[contra]panorama

finished

Exhibition views of the 'Epilogue' exhibition. Photo: Juande Jarillo

[contra]panorama is the second edition of the triennial Panorama. It is intended as an extended exercise that interprets the title of the project literally in order to question both the relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its ability to offer a panoramic image of the present.

There is a desperate optimism in biennials’ and triennials’ repeated attempts to define the present and plant their flag in the future. Somehow, they are always late to the party. The accelerated pace at which the art system picks up and discards its chosen themes of interest only exacerbates that feeling that everything is getting old prematurely. Now that the future has ceased to be the repository of all the unfulfilled promises of modernity and become instead the source of our planetary anxieties, what is the point of continuing to organise biennials? As an institution that serves to arrange the modern and make it legible, does the museum have any legitimacy left?

What began as a Prologue is becoming an Epilogue, a series of add-ons. This new presentation of [contra]panorama brings together five works produced specifically for the project, which will unfold in the space in a series of ongoing transitions. The exhibition will open with pieces by Julia Montilla, Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha. These works under construction will coexist and keep the doors to the exhibition rooms open at all times, as well as operating in connection with the actions in the entrezonas, with Albert Gironès, Eva Paià and Marina Ribot, before finally giving way (and space) to Montserrat Moliner and Elena Blesa Cábez in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral. While seemingly disparate, all these projects perform gestures that denaturalise the museum space, drawing attention to the protocols, working conditions, norms and infrastructures that serve to construct the museum as stage. This highlights the continuous but largely invisible maintenance work needed to sustain the institution and its agents. It also suggests the possibility of a dismantling exercise that would open up to other forms of institutional imagination.

		
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dates

From October 24, 2024 to April 21, 2025

documentation

Brochure

title

Epilogue

dates

From October 24, 2024 to April 21, 2025

title

Epilogue

documentation

Brochure

Projects

Elena Blesa Cábez in collaboration with Violeta Mayoral, Interval, 2024

Listening situation and online documentation This project by Elena Blesa Cábez, an experienced educator who has worked at MACBA, brings together her artistic practice as a researcher and educator (without creating a hierarchy) while opening up a critical, fertile reflection on the role of education and mediation in museums. During the course of the project, Elena Blesa Cábez decided to work with the artist Violeta Mayoral in order to shape her research in the rooms of the museum. This switch of positions Elena initiates with her project gives rise to a multitude of questions and movements regarding how different practices and ways of inhabiting the museum fit and relate to one another. With this in mind, the project unfurls through a sound proposal and mediation of it in the museum’s rooms, which make us become aware of attention and listening. This way, mediation reveals itself to be inextricable from dialogue and interdependence.

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Albert Gironès, Eva Paià, Marina Ribot. interareas, 2024–2025

A living, open work process, a meeting space and a publication interareas is an unusual project within an art institution. A space of temptation marked by a continued dialogue with what is happening in the museum. This project has emerged from the desire to seek and activate meeting spaces for the different agents and multiple narratives that constitute [contra]panorama, thus highlighting the conversations and synergies generated during processes of artistic research, which often remain outside the exhibition format. How can we make what happens within internal processes visible?

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Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha, High Latencies, 2024

Diagrams, public programme and podcast series In the transdisciplinary project High latencies, by visual artist and programmer Nicolás Malevé and activist and researcher Jara Rocha, the museum’s infrastructures and socio-technical dependences operate as a case study. For this purpose, the pair have self-instituted a temporary department in the museum: the Department of Presence Studies. In this space, and in constant conversation with different teams at MACBA, they propose three areas of interest for thinking with and from digital logistical operations.

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Montserrat Moliner, Value production. Years worked ≠ Years of contribution, 2024

Installation The idea that presents throughout this project is to show that we exercise a trade in which our existing protection systems do not guarantee basic care when we reach retirement age. Many artists cannot regularly make social security contributions, as they cannot pay the freelance quota, and they end up without a decent pension. We are not the exception; this is common in non-regulated professions that depend on extreme variability in demand, which requires workers to improvise all sorts of extra complementary activities according to their chosen discipline or sector. Most artists who want to live off their work are financially unstable, unless they can live off passive income or, in other words, have guaranteed financial support.

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Julia Montilla, Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, 2024

Julia Montilla. Esperits sorollosos agitant eines per reclamar que el servei de neteja és treball estructural, 2024. [contra]panorama. Foto Juande Jarillo

Julia Montilla, Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, 2024

Installation Julia Montilla presents Noisy Spirits Shaking Tools to Declare that the Cleaning Service is Structural Work, an installation that asks how to bring workers who permanently inhabit the museum but usually go unnoticed during opening hours back into the institution’s public life. This pattern fosters a disconnect with the essentiality and value of these workers’ tasks and knowledge.

See the programme

Activities

14 results

Between Words and Gestures: Ways of Being in the Museum

interareas. [contra]panorama

Activity

Friday April 11, 2025

Photo courtesy of Fernando Domínguez Rubio

Study of Presence with Fernando Domínguez Rubio, in conversation with Nicolas Malevé and Jara Rocha

High Latencies. [contra]panorama

Activity

Thursday April 3, 2025

Notes on the Retirement System for Artists in Spain

Value Production: Years Worked ≠ Years of Contribution. [contra]panorama

Activity

Wednesday March, 2025

Debate with PAAC: What we mean when we talk about shared responsibility for professionalising artistic practice

Value Production: Years Worked ≠ Years of Contribution. [contra]panorama

Activity

Wednesday March 12, 2025

A Relative Space: Meeting on the Conditions of Mediation

Interval. [contra]panorama

Activity

Thursday March 27, 2025

To Keep Up Contributions You Need to Keep Up a Value, by Montserrat Moliner

Value Production: Years Worked ≠ Years of Contribution. [contra]panorama

Activity

Wednesday February 26, 2025

Tour/visit with interareas at [contra]panorama

interareas. [contra]panorama

Activity

Friday February 21, 2025

Dos dispositius electrònics a l’interior de petites càpsules de metacrilat subjectes peruna estructura metàl·lica que incorpora cablejat i il·luminació, vistos en contraplà,contra un cel obert i ennuvolat.

Study of Presence with Nerea Calvillo

High Latencies

Activity

Wednesday, January 22, 2025

Visit Interval conducted by Elena Blesa Cábez

Interval. [contra]panorama

Activity

17 January, 14 and 28 February and 14 March, 2025

Tour/visit with interareas at [contra]panorama

interareas. [contra]panorama

Activity

Thursday, December 12, 2024

Study of Presence with Editorial Concreta

High Latencies

Activity

Sunday November 17, 2024

A red bouquet overlay interrupts an image of ripening chillies alive in the garden. Captions in the foreground of the image read ‘Community Technology’.

Study of Presence with Ren Loren Britton (talk). Feeling-Knowing-Making: Unlining Techno-Stories

High Latencies

Activity

Thursday October 17, 2024

Wobbly lines and rounded shapes overlay, sharing a chopped experience of a walk through Matterport, an online exhibition-visiting tool. Mapped out spaces overlap, and it is ultimately unclear how navigation could work. Here, images are collaged together, letting go of the idea of movement in favour of overlapping and non-aligning forms.

Study of Presence with Ren Loren Britton (workshop). Non-Foreclosed Access Points: pluralizing virtuality

High Latencies

Activity

Thursday October 17, 2024

Resonances. Collective Tour Through Different Areas of the Museum

interareas. [contra]panorama

Activity

Monday July 1, 2024

In 2021, MACBA launched the triennial Panorama, which aimed to “deepen its collaboration and dialogue with local artists and cultural agents”. [contra]panorama, the second edition of Panorama retains the same aim but works towards it through a year-long series of interventions that take the project’s title literally, in order to question both the continuing relevance of the triennial (or biennial) format and its capacity to offer a panoramic image of the present.