Opening of the exhibition "Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World"
2025-02-13 19:00 - 21:00 (Europe/Madrid)
Next Thursday, February 13, 2025, at 7:00 p.m., the opening of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World will take place, an exhibition curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Tàpies Museum, and Pablo Allepuz, curator of the Tàpies Museum collection.
Free access until capacity is reached.
See you there!

Approximations. Museu Tàpies Guided Tour 2025
2025-03-01 12:00 - 2025-06-14 12:00 | Museu Tàpies
Guided tour of the Museu Tàpies’ current exhibitions, with an introduction to the history of the building.

Current exhibitions:

· Antoni Tàpies. The imagination of the world
· Marta Palau. My Paths are Earthly
· Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency
· Noor Abed. A Night We Held Between

The (In)visible Exiles
2025-03-04 - 2025-05-20 | Museu Tàpies
Archivo General de la Nación de México

Exile is a reality that is very difficult to make visible, since it is, above all, an experience of internal uprooting. Nevertheless, women artists, among them the filmmakers who went into exile, tried time and again to stage and represent their woundedness.
Film producer and director Tània Balló and filmmaker, theorist and film promoter Luis E. Parés programme a film series linked to the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly, with the aim of presenting three different approaches to this wound and the way it is incarnated. Thus, through screenings, talks and conferences, we will generate a space for debate and reflection on these films and on other, more contemporary ones, which have allowed us to rediscover these works and their authors in the present day.

Tània Balló Colell is a filmmaker, writer, cultural promoter and researcher. She is the creator and director of the project Las Sinsombrero (2014–present) and Las Anónimas. Obras sin relato en las colecciones de arte moderno de los museos españoles (Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, Fundación BBVA, 2023). As a filmmaker, her films El Museo Invisible (2023) and the documentary trilogy Las Sinsombrero (2015–2021) stand out. She is the author of the Las Sinsombrero trilogy (2016, 2018, 2022), of Querido Diario: hoy ha empezado la guerra (2017) and of Les Combatents. La història oblidada de les milicianes antifeixistes (2021). She is also curator of the exhibitions Jorge Semprún. El largo viaje (2024–2025), Las Sinsombrero (2022) and No Pasarán. 16 días Madrid 1936 (2018).

Luís E. Parés holds a PhD in Communication from the Pompeu Fabra University and is artistic director of Cineteca Matadero Madrid. He has worked as part of the programming department of the Filmoteca Española, the editorial board of Caimán CDC and the programming committee of the Sevilla Film Festival, and was coordinator of the RTVE programme Historia de nuestro cine. He has published the books Notes sur l’émigration-Espagne 1960. Apunts per a una pel·lícula invisible (2011) and Filmar el exilio desde Francia (2012). He has directed the short films Los conspiradores (2021) and El espectro político (2023), as well as the feature film La primera mirada (2023).

Programme
4.March 25
22 April 25
20 May 25

María Luisa Elío in En el balcón vacío

2nd edition of the Teresa Barba Critical Writing Competition
2025-03-11
Antoni Tàpies. Cartes per a la Teresa, 1974. Lithography. © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP. Photography: © Lluís Bover, 2024.

The Museu Tàpies is announcing the second edition of the art criticism text competition aimed at students from upper primary school to university degrees and higher education courses.
The aim is to enhance the students’ critical thinking through a dialogue with the work of Antoni Tàpies that will inspire them to analyse today’s society and the world around us; to encourage students to express themselves through writing; and to connect a young public with the work, thought and concerns of Antoni Tàpies, which are unquestionably a bridge to thinking about our own times and a vindication of a less anthropocentric worldview.
The competition starts from the idea of written art criticism based on a personal interpretation of the work of art counterposed with the present day. It is about making the selected work dialogue with elements from the outside world. Art criticism is, therefore, an attitude or position towards life that interrogates and questions everything that happens around us.
The evaluation of the texts will take into account: linguistic, expressive and analytical maturity; a free interpretation of the work of Antoni Tàpies; and the connections made between that work and the social, cultural and political context of the moment.
BASES
PARTICIPANTS

Students who, during the 2023–24 academic year, are attending the last year of primary school, up to secondary school and Baccalaureate level, and intermediate vocational training.
Participation may be individual or collective, bearing in mind only one prize will be awarded per category.

WORK

Each student or group may submit a single original and unpublished text, written in Catalan, Spanish or English and which has not received a prize in any other competition.
The text must be between 200 and 1,000 words in length.
It is essential that the text has a title and specifies to which work or group of works by Antoni Tàpies it refers.

PREPARATION
The call for the competition will be accompanied by meetings with teaching staff interested in participating, leading to visits to the Museum with their students. In order to further facilitate a closer knowledge of the work of Antoni Tàpies, the Museu Tàpies will be organising discussions at the Museum, sending information, etc., thus providing full support to enable the school to make the competition a core of its curriculum. The Museu Tàpies will also be providing three training modules spread throughout the year aimed at teaching staff. These modules are designed to help teachers articulate the competition in the classroom, while deepening an understanding of the work of the artist and the need to contextualise it the present. In addition, people over the age of sixteen who want to visit the museum or library to prepare for the competition can request free access by sending an email to: concurs@museutapies.org

REGISTRATION AND DOCUMENTATION
Students’ texts should be sent by email to: concurs@museutapies.org
Indicate in the subject box: 1st art criticism competition for students at the Museu Tàpies.
The following documentation must be attached:
-File with the details of the student or group of students, including: name, age, academic year, name of the school and name and contact of the reference teacher.
-Both the texts and the file must be sent in PDF format.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
May 11, 2025.

AWARDS
A total of three prizes of vouchers of 300 € in books for each of the following three categories:

Prize of 300 € for the winner of the upper primary level, and publication of the text.
Prize of 300 € for the winner of the secondary school level (ESO), and publication of the text.
Prize of 300 € for the winner of Baccalaureate and vocational training level, and publication of the text.
Prize of €300 for the winner of university degrees and higher education training courses and publication of the text.

At the end of the competition there will be a public presentation of the winning and finalist texts that will take place at the Museu Tàpies, with a reading of the winning texts, and the jury’s comments. This will be followed by the presentation of the awards and of a publication including the selected writings.

EVALUATION CRITERIA
The jury of the evaluation committee will take into account the following aspects:

Literary quality of the text: up to 25 points
Interest and originality of the critique or reflection proposed in the text: up to 25 points
The extent to which the reflections connect with the work of Antoni Tàpies: up to 20 points
The degree to which the text connects the work of Antoni Tàpies with current events: up to 30 points

JURY
The jury will be formed by one member of the Associació Catalana de Crítica d’Art (ACCA), as a specialist art critic, as well as four media journalists, both staff and freelance.
· Caterina Almirall, curator and teacher. Member of the ACCA.
· Teresa Sesé, editor of the art section of La Vanguardia.
· Laia Manonelles Moner, PhD in art history from the Universitat de Barcelona, ​​teacher of the Art Criticism subject of the Art History degree at Universitat de Barcelona.
· Albert Mercadé, president of the ACCA, art critic, curator and historian.
· Maria Palau, editor of the culture section of the newspaper El Punt Avui.
· Antoni Ribas Tur, visual arts and culture editor of Diari ARA

SELECTION OF THE WINNING ENTRIES
The jury’s verdict will be made public on June 10, 2025 on the website of the Museu Tàpies: museutapies.org
The award ceremony will take place on December 10, 2025, at the Museu Tàpies. All members of the jury will be invited to attend, together with leading professionals in the sector. The media and all agents involved in the contest will also be invited. The event will consist of the public reading of the winning texts, followed by the jury’s comments.

Opening of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: Veiling Transparency with a conversation between the artist and Marta Gili
2025-03-13 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
The exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas: veiling transparency opens with a conversation between the artist and Marta Gili, art critic, curator and teacher specializing in photography and contemporary visual arts. A dialogue about the artist’s creative process and the concerns that inspire his work, and to connect Showcases with topics such as the ecological crisis, environmental degradation and the social challenges faced by modern cities. Likewise, the role of art in raising awareness of sustainability and how urban space can be a reflection of our attitudes and behaviors towards the environment will be discussed.
The conversation will be moderated by Patricia Sorroche, curator of the exhibition.

Marta Gili
She is a curator of exhibitions and public programs. Between 1911 and 2006, he was responsible for the visual arts program of the Fundació ”la Caixa”. From 2006 until 2018, he directed the Jeu de Paume National Gallery in Paris. From 2019 until 2023, she was the director of the Ecole Nationale Supèrieure de la Photographie in Arles. Currently, she continues her work as an independent curator of artistic projects.

[Anna Malagrida, Vitrines. Rue Chareton (2009) © Anna Malagrida / VEGAP, 2025]

Following the Sun. Second edition
2025-03-22 | Museu Tàpies
Sound Experiments, Performance Formats and New Situations

Taking as its starting point the contemporary mythology derived from the Antoni Tàpies piece Mitjó [Sock] (2010)—which we understand as a gesture of disobedience and irony, a celebration of the downtrodden and marginalised—the second edition of the series Following the Sun aims to give rise to new performative dialogues with other bodies and identities, creating frictions with societal normativity:

The liberation attained by artists over the last one-hundred years needs not lead us to deny the possibility of accepting other proposals, beliefs, philosophies or cultures, when considered more appropriate for modern mentality. Particularly because it is precisely due to this liberation and independence that we might really learn to respect—I do not like the term tolerate, as will be explained further on—and value all these human manifestations aforementioned, as they rightly deserve, whether coming from our own tradition or from other civilisations. From out of this liberty, we will more readily and unbiasedly be able to convene a grand forum where the voices of all cultures might be heard and where all proposals have their place. Most especially, we will no longer hold to the belief that this tiny bastion we call “Western civilisation” has been something exceptional.
Excerpt from Antoni Tàpies “La imaginació del món” [The Imagination of the World]

The avant-garde always opted for gestures that revealed a certain introspection in relation to the reverberations and possibilities of our actions, words and daily belongings. The work Mitjó, conceived in 1991 and produced and installed in 2010 on the terrace of the Museu Tàpies, is truly a summary of these attitudes of “liberation”—citing Tàpies—that come about through collectivised discomfort and disobedience. What happens when we carry out gestures that are unexpected and unusual, when we impact contexts we “should not”?
From the understanding of Mitjó as an effigy and symbol of marginalisation, this series is conceived as a pagan ritual, inviting nine artists to venerate this object and activate it with new narratives that pertain to creators’ realities. How does the queer body influence society, in visual and positional terms? Why are certain bodies considered disruptive, provocative, polemical or inferior? How might we learn to find greater enjoyment from what is extravagant and ignored?
Following the Sun is an extended solstice, a celebratory menstrual cycle, an offering to the Museu Tàpies as a place of encounter, friction and action. The series seeks to bring together various voices that create by speaking from marginalisation, struggle and resistance, yet also in a celebratory way, with a playful spirit. With a clear idea that avant-garde approaches are as alive as ever, these performance and sound activations are drawn from queer, decolonial, dissident and anti-authoritarian realities, all of which are resonant in the philosophy of Tàpies regarding the flight from the West and the creativity unfolding in the gesture of Mitjó, which continues to unsettle and shake the normativity.
The programme of the second edition of Following the Sun has been curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. The graphic design of the programme and solar navigation calendar were created by designers Ignasi Ayats and Ana Habash. The illustrations are by Eduard Sales.

Gabriel Virgilio Luciani is a curator and professor of Art History based in Barcelona. Their research revolves around the intersection of queer theory, magic, decoloniality, poetry and objectual affectivity. From 2017 to 2019, alongside their studies in Fine Arts at Escola Massana, they were the curator of the self-run space, CERA 13; a radical experimental laboratory in Barcelona’s Raval neighbourhood. In 2020, they obtained their Masters Degree in Digital Art Curatorship at the Universitat Ramon Llull – ESDi, in Barcelona, during which they collaborated with the gallery Dilalica. From 2021 to 2024, they were editor-in-chief of exibart.es, a contemporary culture magazine covering art exhibitions, biennials, fairs and festivals that also features interviews with artists, curators and institutional directors. Currently, they are Head of Programs and Academia of Metàfora Studio Arts, an international contemporary art education platform located in Barcelona.
Over the last nine years their curated exhibitions have been presented in programmes such as Art Nou and Loop Barcelona videoart festival. They have also curated and co-curated projects at THEFLOOR, CERA 13, TKM Room, Escola Massana, àngels barcelona – espai 2, Tangent Projects, L&B gallery, Galeria H2O, Reial Cercle Artístic (as a guest curator for the 1+1+1 Loop curated edition), Espai Souvenir and Mèdol – Centre d’Arts Contemporànies de Tarragona, amongst others.

Programmed Sessions
Saturday 22 March, at 1 pm: Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña
Saturday 12 April, at 1 pm: Agnes Essonti Luque
Saturday 17 May, at 1 pm: feyfeyfey
Saturday 14 June, at 7 pm: Adrasha
Saturday 20 September, at 6 pm: laSADCUM Guillem Jiménez
Saturday 20 September, at 7 pm: Sejal Parekh
Saturday 18 October, at 1 pm: Venus Jasper
Saturday 15 November, at 1 pm: Bella Báguena
Saturday 13 December, at 1 pm: Silvia Albert Sopale

Link to the first edition

Following the Sun. Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña
2025-03-22 13:00 - 14:30 | Museu Tàpies
I Swear

We welcome the springtime with the start of this new edition of the series Following the Sun, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani. On this occasion, Gabriel presents a programme that questions societal normativity, inviting queer, decolonial, dissident and antiauthoritarian voices to the terrace of the Museu Tàpies, presided by the artist’s Mitjó [Sock], an iconic image of marginalisation.
The series opens with Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña, with many questions along the way: What conditions are imposed when someone does not consent to “belong”? Losing their home? Being forced to live on the margins? Renouncing everything that is theirs to access a different culture? Trans bodies, migrant bodies and so many others are threatened because they do not fit into the standards that not even Antoni Tàpies’ Mitjó can respond to.
The proposal invites us to draw and erase borders, tracing the experience of confronting Spanish and European migratory institutions. This involves a negotiation based on contradiction, in a context that refuses to resonate with a plurality of bodies that express themselves as dissident, as disobedient—intentionally or not—and which, in their own way, respond to the expectations of normative society.

Amaru “Personaje Personaje” Peña (she) is a culebra travesti born in Quito, Ecuador, in 1991, and a migrant with Spanish nationality, after having resided in the Kingdom of Spain for a few years. She was trained as a psychotherapist and studied a postgraduate course in Mediation and Artistic Research. Since 2015 she has combined her work in psychotherapy, dedicate to trans and sexually diverse people, as well as migrants, racialised individuals and children, with an artistic practice as a performer, where she also engages her own experience as a member of some of these collectives.

Photograph: Florian Hetz

The Background of Things
2025-03-25 18:00 - 18:40
Arranged on a table, objects are raised and the table gets raised by the objects. A performer (Marc Caellas) reads a selection of poetic texts accompanied by the movement of a dancer (Corinne Spitalier). Each thing is a message, a pulse that reveals itself, a hatch in the void.
We activate these power objects with words and movement. Drawings, stickers, cards, masks, things that flame up to the edge of their limits and inwards, towards their hopeful core. They seduce us.
This is the first activation of the serie A Hatch in the Void proposed by Marc Caellas as part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.

A Horizontal Spin
2025-03-27 19:00 - 19:30 | Museu Tàpies
‘Strategically place the palm of your hand on the chair, lean it at a 30° angle and spin it at a constant speed. Energetic turns, physically identical in time and pace, a motorised mantra which ever since I was young led me to a state of instantaneous calm, like a secret domestic exercise. Reviving this idea of the spinning chair as a gesture that expands and visualises the loop; repetition and concentration as the structural features of all melodies.’
Fito Conesa opens the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies by returning to childhood, proposing a musical exercise of spinning based on the voice, with repetitive structures that are effectively the sonorous foundation for the unpredictable. Repetition as a background, where the temporal features that inhabit it arise naturally. Voice, spinning, song and movement. A gesture to musical practice which, from concrete music or sound performance, also celebrates space, the architectures that inhabit it and the sounds these spaces postulate.
This action features vocal collaborations from: Claudia Scheider, Erika Michie and Enrikson.

Fito Conesa has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona. His work is found in museum collections, such as MACBA, and in institutional collections like Col·lecció Banc Sabadell and the University of Granada. Conesa’s work has been exhibited in various museums, art centres and festivals, including La Casa Encendida in Madrid, Matadero Madrid, CaixaForum and MACBA, amongst others.
In 2022 Conesa received the Alfonso X Prize (Región de Murcia) in the category of new media, and was awarded the Video Creation Prize, organised by the Visual Arts Spaces of Catalonia, the Santa Mònica art centre, the Catalan Ministry of Culture and Loop Festival.

The Chairs of Tàpies. Second Edition
2025-03-27 19:00 - 20:00
The second edition of the action art series The Chairs of Tàpies, subtitled Tattooed Memories, embraces two lines of inquiry: memory and the body, drawing from the idea of the trace that leaves its mark, and the legacy on the skin, as if it were a scar. These two features, whose character draws from Tàpies, act as a narrative, making it possible to connect universes of the past with worlds of the present, thus creating a living archive of experiences, memories and identities.
Within this framework, the body is understood beyond its physicality; it is granted a symbolic sense which, as with skin, is a reflection of stories and experiences. In this way, each of these actions in the series makes it possible to explore how the body recollects, stores and transforms individual and collective experiences in physical and emotional memory, and how these memories emerge and communicate through performance and movement. By including the gesture, the series emphasises the fleeting presence of the body in time and space, and celebrates how recollections are upheld and updated through it, in continual reinterpretation of the present.
The set of nine sessions features a polyphony of expressive languages, where the voice and movement take on a new dimension, out of the express need to question corporeality. Bodies charged with stories and absences, weighted down; bodies imprisoned in what they have to be, what they want to be, in what they were; bodies that are not bodies, bodies that are only bodies, bodies calling out for bodies. The biography of the body.

The programme of the second edition of the action art series The Chairs of Tàpies, subtitled Tattooed Memories, has been curated by Judith Barnés.

Projected programme:
27/3/25: Fito Conesa
24/4/25: Laia Estruch
29/5/25: Matria Libre – Arte sin fronteras
26/6/25: Esther Ferrer
17/7/25: Benvenuto Chavajay
25/9/25: Joan Morey
30/10/25: Leonor Castro
27/11/25: Mireia Calafell
18/12/25: Mónica Valenciano

Previous edition 2024

Sala de Reflexió (detail), by Antoni Tàpies, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. © Museu Tàpies. Photo: Eva Carasol, 2023

Art as a Facilitator of the Worlds to Come
2025-04-08 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
How can art help us to think about, criticise and dialogue with established economic and social structures? Starting out from the idea that the capitalist world we live in was built on colonial violence and displacement, we realise that for many populations the world has already ended. At the same time, resistance has kept alive the imagination of what could have been and could still be. Through art, we can contemplate possibilities that escape the limits of social and scientific thought, as the artist is not restricted by method, but only by imagination, the limits of which are porous and extendible.
From this point of view, art not only denounces consumerist culture, the superficiality of an object-based economy or the dehumanisation of the system, but also enables us to draw other futures, to map out cracks in the dominant structure and make up new forms of existence. If the colonial/capitalist project has not completed its task, this means it has not completely won either; therefore, its defeat is still possible, and with it the construction of other possible worlds.
In the context of the exhibition Anna Malagrida. Opacitas. Veiling Transparency, we invite researcher Morena Hanbury Lemos to connect the exhibition with the global economic system and with public policies to promote economic sovereignty, in order to construct new ways of inhabiting the city and the world in which it is our lot to live.

Morena Hanbury Lemos is a doctoral candidate in Ecological Economics at the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA-UAB). She holds a master’s degree in Political Ecology, Degrowth, and Environmental Justice from UAB, a master’s in Decolonial Thought and Humanities, and a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Management from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Her research focuses on how colonial patterns are perpetuated in the global economy, paying special attention to the analysis of unequal exchange between historically colonised and colonising countries. She studies public policies to foster economic sovereignty, decolonisation and the reorganisation of resources and labour to sustainably meet the needs of the populations in the Global South.

Opening of the exhibition Noor Abed. A Night We Held Between
2025-04-09 18:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
On the occasion of the opening screening of the audiovisual work A Night We Held Between (2024) at the Museu Tàpies, Noor Abed and the project curators, LaOtra (María Amador and Patricia Sorroche), discuss the artist’s personal and creative universe on the basis of the book Stars at Midday, presented for the first time in Barcelona and which will be available in the Museu Tàpies bookshop.
Stars at Midday –نجوم الضُهر is a personal diary where the artist sets down poetic and audiovisual notes on the production phase of the film A Night We Held Between, shot in Palestine in 2023 with her family and friends. The film centres on Song for the Fighters, found in the sound archive of the Popular Art Center Palestine. Through the layers of the song, in a maze of sounds and places, the film evokes history as a permanent present tense, a collective act of imagination.
Like the film, but more intimately and profoundly, the book weaves together narrative fragments, songs and daily observations to create a fusion of sequences of natural, prepared movements, of documentary and fictional elements.
Through a choreography of bodies, places, stories and time frames, Abed’s work encourages thought about the forms of social action and resistance in everyday life.

Noor Abed (Jerusalem, 1988) is an interdisciplinary artist and film-maker who works in the intersection between performance, media and film. Through a process of visual creation of images, her work creates situations in which social possibilities are rehearsed and performed.
Abed attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York (2015–2016) and the Home Workspace Program (HWP) of Ashkal Alwan in Beirut (2016–2017). She received her BA from the International Academy of Arts in Palestine and a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, Los Angeles.
Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia; Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival (Jihlava); Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montreal; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw; The Mosaic Rooms, London; and MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome among others. In 2021–2022 she was assistant curator on the artistic staff of documenta 15 in Kassel, Germany. Abed has been a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2022–2024).

Han Nefkens Foundation – Museu Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022, in collaboration with NTU CCA, Singapore; WIELS, Brussels; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai.

Following the Sun. Agnes Essonti Luque
2025-04-12 13:00 - 14:30 | Museu Tàpies
Unguent
Water, juniper, palm oil, honey, coconut milk, catfish, popcorn… An offering to heal every wound. Actions that heal. That strip off layers of dead skin. Of atrophied limbs. Of poisoned ghosts.
Agnes Essonti Luque will be entering into a ritualistic dialogue based on Ibori, a Yoruba ritual that aims to satisfy your Ori (a consciousness of the hereafter) through offerings, especially food. In front of Tàpies’ Mitjó [Sock], the Cameroonian–Spanish artist will use a series of unguents, making her own body into the medium. With these actions, the artist seeks to share with the audience ways of neutralising the frustrations of the past, offering a possible solution through simple gestures that, with repetition, become sacred. She invites us to recognise that rituals are for everybody and to realise that they can help to connect to ancestral wisdom, fonts of hidden powers, reserves of vitality and arsenals of protection.

Agnes Essonti Luque is a Cameroonian–Spanish artist and curator, whose work is inspired by black and post-colonial feminist thinkers and revolves around topics like ancestral connections, memories of childhood and nostalgia. Her work spans a range of media, including photography, textiles, installations and performances. In recent years she has explored the construction of Afro-diasporic identities and the tireless search for home, focusing on processes of hybridisation and pidginisation. She sees her own work as a way of offering new readings of historical events and reimagining better futures.

Her work has featured in various national and international exhibitions and events, among them Manifesta 15 (2024), Foodscapes, the Spanish Pavilion at the 18th Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023) and 1384 Days Wide at Rencontres de Bamako (2015). Her performances have been presented at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza and at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS). Her work A Journey is part of the MNCARS collection.

Photo credit: Viatge, sol, eternitat. © Quique Curbelo, 2025.

Raw
2025-04-24 19:00 - 19:30 | Museu Tàpies
Raw is a voice improvisation based on cuts and sprains, exposing the space between the body of flesh and bones and the aerial, spiritual body of the voice. It is an investigation in sound and movement based on the gesture of our breath in space, starting from the idea that the voice does not belong to us, that it is a body that travels and lives outside of our bodies for a determined period of time, and is hard to remember.

Laia Estruch (Barcelona, 1981) is the second creator invited to participate in the series The Chairs of Tàpies: Tattooed Memories. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona (2010), and studied the final degree year at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York). Her artistic practice is developed in the context of performance art and sculpture, through which she researches the language of the body and the voice. She has presented projects at CCEMx. Centro Cultural de España en México (2020), MACBA. Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2022), PUBLICS (Helsinki, 2022), Hauser & Wirth Menorca (2023), the Bienal de Arte Paiz (Guatemala, 2023), MNAC. Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (2023), El Patio by Zona Maco (Baja California, Mexico, 2024), the Triennial Kortrijk (Belgium, 2024) and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2025).

A session of the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies

Wild Tarot: Barcelona Poesia 2025
2025-05-08 17:30 - 20:00
Sold Out Tickets

The Wild Tarot adventure is a card and piano presentation performed live by Oriol Sauleda and Lulu Martorell. It is a musical consultancy and sound bite, inspired by the unique character of tarot hands, in the time and place of the cards being pulled and those having them read.
The session, performed out loud, sounds out and does not preach, presenting symbols as the keys to open up the queen’s gardens. Driven by tarot’s Major Arcana, Oriol guides us through a realm that hosts Lulu’s song and melody. It is the result of tarot’s irrational power, its seductive attraction, the immediate poetics it reveals, for in tarot, as in lyrical poetry and the chaotic order of the universe, everything is connected and resonates. This leads to the initial invocation, the “Spiritual Canticle” of Saint John of the Cross, unleashing the sincere, ritual mechanics of Wild Tarot. This exclusive premiere has been prepared for Festival Barcelona Poesia, in the context of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World.

Oriol Sauleda presents his poetry like a minstrel, with the charm of a griot who needs sonnets to make himself heard. He insists on poetic play, in momentary chance and improvising in order to be on time. Every so often he publishes a book. Sauleda adds fuel to the fire with words from theatre, rock music, tarot and the Immaculate Conception, ready for the cold. He does not do this alone, but rather needs powerful allies like Lulu herself, along with Núria Martínez Vernis, Memi March, Amor Estadella, Montse Colomé and other great women. The improvisation sessions done with Lulu Martorell are called Concepcionals. More recently, in collaboration with Marcel·lí Bayer, they have activated memory and recollection in the show Adamar Johnson, reviving a totally unknown poet who died during the AIDS epidemic.
Lulu Martorell is just as she was in 1984, when she presented the TV music programme ‘Pleitaguensam’, or the mythic, unclassifiable ‘Glasnost’: leather jacket, wavy hair and a punky voice that speaks whatever comes to mind. Younger generations do not know enough about what she contributed through her programmes. Singing, playing music, writing or making movies, surrounded by her friends—that is the air she breathes. Oriol Martorell, Carlos Santos, Agustí Fernández, Pepe Sales, Albert Pla and Africa have all been her guides. Now, holding tight to Oriol Sauleda and the musical project Concepcionals, they swim against the current of the Llobregat River until finally getting to the Konvent art centre, near the headwaters, where everything comes together.

fe sense obres morta és. A film tribute by Albert Serra to Antoni Tàpies
2025-05-08 20:00 - 22:00
Premiere of Albert Serra’s film tribute to Antoni Tàpies.

The Museu Tàpies presents the tribute that the film director, producer and screenwriter Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) has dedicated to the artist Antoni Tàpies.
The film “fe sense obres morta és” delves into one of the most emotional and surprising aspects of the artist’s universe, exploring it from Serra’s singular and provocative perspective. The film is the result of the museum’s invitation to the director to make a free, contemporary and deeply personal approach to Tàpies’ work and thought. The film does not aim to illustrate, but to evoke; generate a sensory experience that dialogues with the poetic and material force that defines his artistic career.
On May 8, at 8 p.m., the film will be publicly screened at the Filmoteca de Catalunya, in a session that will feature the participation of Albert Serra and Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies.
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[Work: Antoni Tàpies. Jo parlo amb la mà (1999). Private Collection © Comissió Tàpies / VEGAP, 2025.]

Following the sun. feyfeyfey
2025-05-17 13:00 - 15:00
This emerging collective, united in a network of queerness, has woven together a sound performance piece, brb do not perceive me unless ur ready 2 speak in r1ddles and chill with beautiful r0cks xxx, that explores communication phenomena, and specifically the transmission and reception of queer frequencies.
Understanding queer communication systems as subversive tools that enable members of our community to be eco-localised and protect each other, the collective uses sound and visual elements to express rhythmic, cryptic and natural cyclic pulsations between the three members. These reverberations bounce off porous bodies, in transmissions devoured by open ears, as vibrational absorptions and other forms of abstract, poetic and non-verbal communication come together to create a dissonant aria in dialogue with the natural world, situating queer existences through communication.

feyfeyfey is an emerging Barcelona-based art collective whose members are Alida Maria Lanzi, Anusha Jean Ramesh and Bram Dul. It uses performance and sound to explore aspects of queerness, and is interested in the elasticity of access, as well as the politics of movement and the act of sounding out together as friends, from varied stances.
Feyfeyfey creates spaces that question how we relate with ourselves, others and the worlds we inhabit. In the past, the term fey in English meant ‘destined to die, condemned’, and was used as a vulgar term for homosexuals. It is likewise a term used to refer to fairies. Here it is repeated three times, asserting itself as a sound ritual.
The practice of Alida Maria Lanzi (Germany, 2004) is focused on the construction of worlds: imaging alternative spaces where queer bodies might exist beyond binary constructs and norms. Using sculpture, installation and performance, they combine organic and inorganic rhythms to create hybrid shapes. Their site-specific works perturb and unsettle, merging liminal space with speculative narratives to imagine new atmospheres and ways of being, opening up new connections and identities. They are currently finishing their thesis at Metàfora Studio Arts.
The work of Anusha Jean Ramesh (Malaysia, 2001) strives to grasp the elemental conditions of connectivity. Their practice tends to be relational, seeking to follow traces of queer displacement, identity and temporalities while basing itself on personal relationships, intuitively channelled through sound, sculpture, installation and video. They are currently completing their thesis at Metàfora Studio Arts, and are preparing a solo exhibition at 200CENT for November 2025.
Bram Dul (Netherlands, 2005) is writing their love letter to sound, where every project creates a new phrase. They translate thoughts on queerness and neuro-divergency into sound, sculpture, installation and performance, shaping their projects through the perspective of childlike admiration and research-based practice. Dul is currently completing a year-long residency at Metàfora Studio Arts, and in September will begin studies at Design Academy Eindhoven.
A session of the second edition of the programme Following The Sun, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani

Aesthetics of Transit: Ancestral Memory and Collective Subconscious
2025-05-21 18:00 - 21:00
The Museu Tàpies presents a seminar with the aim of exploring the language and cosmology of Marta Palau. On the foundation of indigenous cosmovisions and ancestral rituals, topics such as shamanism, healing and sacred symbolism will be addressed.
This event enables us to reflect on how Palau uses practices that channel concepts of magic and history in relation to artistic practice, developing a visual poetics that connects with the collective subconscious and ancestral memory. Her use of natural materials and traditional textile techniques, as well as the creation of symbology rooted in personal experience, help us speak of art as a creative tool for cultural resistance, accentuating the spiritual abundance of native cultures.
As the closing event of the film series ‘The (In)visible Exiles’, this seminar contributes to a rupture with anthropocentric and Eurocentric consciousness, so as to inhabit the world on the basis of other narratives, focusing on collective imaginations. In this regard, the work of Palau should be understood as an act of memory and resistance in the face of dehumanising processes, and as a gesture favouring understanding of the world as a concentric, relational whole.

PROGRAMME
· 6 pm. Presentation of the session by the Museu Tàpies
· 6.10 pm. Lecture ‘Marta Palau Amongst Paths of Exile’, by Mari Paz Balibrea
· 6.50 pm. Lecture ‘Between Two Worlds: Women, Art and Exile’, by Gemma Domènech
· 7.30 pm. Lecture ‘Those Female Visionaries, We Female Visionaries: The Cosmology of Marta Palau’, by Pilar Bonet
· 8.10 pm. Poetic interlude ‘The Word: Exile of Exile’, by Maria Sevilla
· 8.30 pm. Debate with Mari Paz Balibrea, Gemma Domènech, Pilar Bonet and Maria Sevilla, moderated by the Museu Tàpies
· 9 pm. Closing

Mari Paz Balibrea
Balibrea is Professor of Contemporary Spanish Cultural Studies at Birbeck, University of London. Her work explores the political dimension of culture, focusing particularly on 20th-century Spain. In this line of research, she has published widely on the role of left-wing intellectuals, as well as on the legacy of Spanish Republican exiles and the construction of the idea of the citizen in the creative city. She has been an advisor on the art and culture of Republican exiles for the recent remodelling of the permanent collection of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Pilar Bonet Julve
A researcher, historian and art critic, Bonet is a professor at the University of Barcelona. She is an expert on the art and spirituality of visionary European women, and is president of the Fundació Josefa Tolrà – Art Visionari, as well as creator and co-director of the research group Visionary Women Art (ACCA Research Prize, 2023).
An exhibition curator in contemporary art, in recent years her shows have been centred on graphic and textile creativity by heterodox artists: Josefa Tolrà i Madge Gill, dones visionàries, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC), 2023; La mèdium i el poeta. Una conversa astral entre Josefa Tolrà i Joan Brossa, Fundació Joan Brossa, Barcelona, 2020; ALMA. Mèdiums i visionàries, Museu d’Art Es Baluard de Palma, 2019; Josefa Tolrà i Julia Aguilar. Art des de l’altre costat, Les Bernardes de Salt, Girona, 2017; and Josefa Tolrà. Dibujo fuerza fluídica, Can Palauet, Mataró, 2013.

Gemma Domènech
Domènech is Serra Hunter Plan Adjunct Professor in the Department of History and Art History of the University of Girona (UdG), and since 2022 has been the director of the Institut Català de Recerca en Patrimoni Cultural (ICRPC), where she had been a researcher since 2009. Alongside these activities, from 2019 to 2021 she was general director of Democratic Memory of the Government of Catalonia.
She has a PhD in Art History from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (2000), and has had an extensive career in research, with over one hundred publications and presentations at national and international conferences. Highlights include her line of research on the repression and exile of Spanish Republican architects and the Mexican exile of female Catalan artists. These studies have led to collaborative projects with the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Colegio de Jalisco (Guadalajara, Mexico). Domènech is co-author of Segundo diccionario de los catalanes de México (Porrúa, Mexico City, 2022), winner of the 56th Serra d’Or Critic’s Prize in Catalan Research.

Maria Sevilla
Sevilla is a researcher and precarious professor in Catalan language and literature at the University of Barcelona, while also working as a poet and rhapsodist. She has published four books of poems and a plaquette: Dents de polpa (2015), Kalàixnikov (2017), if true: false; else: true (2020), Plastilina (2021) and La nit ovípara (2024). In 2024 she published her first essay, No desitjaràs els béns del proïsme. She has experimented with liminal genres such as sound poetry and video recitals, and since January 2019 has been one of the three programmers at Horiginal. In the performing arts, she has recited her work in many national festivals, as well as in cities such as Quetzaltenango, Istanbul, Vilnius, London, Paris and Calcutta.

Fragments of Earth
2025-05-29 19:00 - 19:30
Matria Libre – Arte sin Fronteras presents a piece of political dance where bodies become matter in movement, leaving ephemeral imprints in space, as if they were scars of a time that has been erased and rewritten. In this piece, dance is not merely gesture, but also an inscription, a draft, a kind of writing made of presence and absence, where each step resonates as a mark of identity and collective memory. The dancers pass through invisible glazes, revealing and concealing fragments of reality, as if they were digging into the material of the forgotten. Between earth and air, between weight and ascent, the dance traces a path towards a type of spirituality that is not found in form but in the empty space it leaves behind.

Matria Libre – Arte sin Fronteras is a pioneering company of political dance. Their piece Sabia Tierra [Wise Earth] was presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. The company recently won an award at the Lens Dans Video Dance Festival, for the piece Abolición de la Guerra [Abolition of War]. The company’s artistic proposal is based on the revival of ancestral knowledge and the creation of corporeal language in the pursuit of justice, which is universal and broadens frontiers. The company is comprised of dancers Ada Saliou and Mayaymara Behoteguy Chávez.
Ada Saliou is a distinguished dancer, choreographer and master of African dance. Through his unique corporeal language, he expresses deep emotions and delves into socially relevant topics like immigration and the environment.
Mayaymara Behoteguy Chávez is a dancer and international activist. Steeped in the context of magic realism, and deeply influenced by the struggle for social justice, she has converted her dance into a cry against capitalism, able to awaken consciences and activate change.

A session of the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies

Weaving Generations: Intergenerational Project on Textile Art and the Work of Marta Palau
2025-06-11 17:00 - 19:00 | Museu Tàpies
I propose a dialogue where I will speak in a language of knots, braided cord, entwined forms. My language will be . . . the harsh clamour of the broken cord, knotted, woven, twisted, braided, tied. . .
Cuesta, Rosendo, ‘Marta Palau, notas de una entrevista imaginaria’.
Marta Palau in El arte feminista de Marta Palau, Vindictas Artes Visuales, TV UNAM. Video

Weaving Generations aims to create a space for encounter and knowledge exchange in relation to textile art. The project is conceived for a group comprised of twelve individuals from Espais de Gent Gran de l’Eixample [Eixample Senior Spaces] of Barcelona, as well as six more from Eix Jove de l’Eixample [Eixample Youth Alliance] and six students with connections to the textile workshop at Escola Massana.
The proposal will be for the group to enter into dialogue with the work of Marta Palau through three practical sessions, dedicated to experimentation with weaving and knot-making techniques. Particular attention will be paid to the materials used, prioritizing those connected to the immediate context or the personal environment of each participant.
The project will conclude with a public activity to assess the processes and results of the sessions, culminating with a performance piece by members of the G.A.C. (Grup d’Acció Creativa) from Eix Jove de l’Eixample.

Programme

· Session 1 (30 April): visit to the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths are Earthly. A small tapestry done with a vertical frame will be made in pairs. Previously, the looms will be prepared with the warp, while the kinds of fibres and materials that can be used for the grid will be explained.

· Session 2 (14 May): collaborative creation of a large tapestry made from materials taken from the immediate territory, along with others brought by the participating individuals. The session is conceived as a way to encourage shared narratives related to materials, their qualities and their origins. This session will feature the special participation of the project Tornen les esquelles [The Sheep Bells Return] and the design firm Cortana.

· Session 3 (28 May): collaborative creation of a circular macramé tapestry, derived from the sculptural volumes and knot-making techniques employed by Marta Palau.

· Public Presentation (11 June): presentation of the results and the technical and learning processes involved in the project. The session will conclude with a performance that dialogues with the work of Marta Palau, conceived and performed by members of the G.A.C. (Grup d’Acció Creativa) from Eix Jove de l’Eixample.

Following the Sun. Adrasha
2025-06-14 19:00 - 20:00
The project mebrat / Հայանական is born from an ongoing investigation into lighthouses understood as an unusual architecture that, paradoxically, resonates with both the idea of guidance and that of border. The experimental artist and sound DJ has dedicated time to studying the different periodicities with which lighthouses emit light, and has translated them into various rhythms and sounds.
Moving away from the nautical connotations of the lighthouse, the sound performance seeks to connect with emotional and geopolitical complexities such as homeland, the need to travel, composite identities, changes in communication and mutating destinies, through a series of field recordings and autobiographical samples: audio recordings of friends and family in Ethiopia and Spain, interwoven with textures of his own voice and maritime motifs.
This sound collage —with a collaboration by Bamba, from the Jokkoo collective— becomes a meditation on the fragility of memory and identity, origin and destination, acceptance and resistance.

Adrasha is an Ethiopian multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona. She began her career as a dancer in Addis Ababa, influenced by traditional and urban sounds from the Horn of Africa. Focused on exploring underground sounds —in particular, contemporary club music from the African continent and its diaspora—, Adrasha’s work attempts to create a dialogue between hybrid sound expressions, such as Afropunk, Gqom, Future Dancehall and current experimental electronic music.
A session within the framework of the second edition of Following the sun series, curated by Gabriel Virgilio Luciani

Florilegium of Lands and Bodies. Performance by Equipo Jeleton
2025-06-19 18:30 - 21:00
Equipo Jeleton offers us a public oracle reading of the Florilegium tarot, questioning the exhibition Marta Palau: My Paths Are Earthly. Throwing threads into the past and the future to engage with the works and their enigmas.
Equipo Jeleton’s Florilegium tarot brings together elements from their Political History of Flowers in twenty-five arcana that depict parts of the body, plants and flowers, and allegorical figures.
The performance will take place in two sessions.

Equipo Jeleton was established in 1999 by Gelen Alcántara Sánchez (Murcia, 1975) and Jesús Arpal Moya (Barakaldo, 1972). They reinterpret literary, musical and visual repertoires in a critical and twisted way with the aim of transmuting poison into medicine. They have recently presented their work at Hangar, Bulegoa Z/B, Bilbao Museoa, MACBA, Fundació Miró, Centro Párraga, La Taller, Universitat Miguel Hernández and Tabakalera.

Untitled Performances with Esther Ferrer
2025-06-26 19:00 - 19:30
The second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies is fortunate to feature Esther Ferrer, a pioneering figure in action art who has made her body an essential tool for resistance, expression and thought. Ferrer sees the body not just as matter, but as a symbolic medium for experiences, memories and conflicts. Her practice works with the persistence of gesture, the construction of time by repetition and the ability of the body to store and transmit, almost like a written skin, the tensions between the I and the world.
On the basis of silence, humour and radicalism, from a coherent, free positioning, she confronts convention, offering a distinctive view of how bodies resist and explain, becoming sensitive archives of identity, absence and presence. Within this framework, Ferrer will therefore be inviting us to celebrate gesture as living memory, as a place from which the body appeals, questions and transforms itself.

Esther Ferrer has been staging actions since the mid-sixties, both individually and as a member of the ZAJ group (which broke up in 1996). In the early 1960s she set up, together with the painter José Antonio Sistiaga, the first Taller de Libre Expresión [Free Expression Workshop], the seed for a whole range of other, parallel activities, among them an experimental school in Elorrio, in Bizkaia province in the Basque Country. From the mid-seventies onwards, she resumed her visual work, with retouched photographs, installations, paintings based on a series of first names and on the number pi, objects and so on.
In the course of her long career as a performance artist, she has taken part in festivals in Spain, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, France, Denmark, Norway, Britain, the Netherlands, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Thailand, Japan, Korea and Palestine, among others.
She has exhibited her visual work at: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid), Galerie J. & J. Donguy (Paris), Galerie Lara Vincy (Paris), Galerie Satellite (Paris), Galería Trayecto (Vitoria), Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Koldo Mitxelena (San Sebastián), Galeria Àngels (Barcelona), Galeria Trinta (Santiago de Compostela), Galería 1 Mira Madrid, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville), Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art (Denmark), Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid), MOCARoma (Mexico City), Museo de Bellas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), ARTIUM (Vitoria), Es Baluard (Palma), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (A Coruña), MAC/VAL (Vitry-sur-Seine, France), CEART (Fuenlabrada), Museo Guggenheim Bilbao and Centre nacional de la danse (Lyon), among others.
She has taught numerous courses at universities, museums and schools of fine art in Canada, France, Italy, Mexico and Switzerland, as well as Spain.
In 1999 she was one of the two artists who represented Spain at the Venice Biennale.
She has won accolades including: Trace: John Boehme Performance Art – Lifetime Achievement Award (2006); the Spanish National Visual Arts Prize (2008); the Basque government’s Gure Artea prize (2012); the MAV prize, the Women in Visual Arts prize (2014); the Marie Claire contemporary art prize (2014); the Velázquez prize (2014); the Golden Drum of the City of Donostia/San Sebastián (2022); the Bernard Heidsieck prize from the Centre Georges Pompidou (2022); and the Francisco Prieto prize from the FNMT, the Spanish national mint (2024).

[Inauguration of the rue Marcel Duchamp in Paris, 1995. Photo: A. Szfran.]

Antoni Llena: Smokey Memories
2025-06-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Museu Tàpies
The publishers L’Avenç and Blume are pleased to jointly present the publication Antoni Llena. Memòries de fum [Antoni Llena: Smokey Memories], on the terrace of the Museu Tàpies.
In this book, Antoni Llena seeks to explain artistic consciousness on the basis of defects and fears, in a fresco that unfolds like a mural charged with contradictions. He begins by sketching out his family context, how he met the person who would be his first partner, a person he still lives with, and enduring friendship. It continues by explaining the unique way Llena discovered art, and his choice to live in the world at a distance, searching for modernity through anachronisms. His decision to live in the world from outside the world. His discovery of art, his interests and his ambitions. His own particular way of doing things, and the roots that have made it grow. His struggles to find a place of his own that was radical, without it being detached from tradition. The artistic personalities who have shaped it, along with the works he has created and others that have influenced him. The path he has taken, without having to lay out a set of markers along the way to get there. Eroticism, loves and phobia, and so much more. Understanding art as a political reality set apart from trendy political choices. Then, all told, his efforts to ensure it is all well written.
This presentation features the presence of the author, Antoni Llena, the philosopher Xavier Antich and the publishers Leopoldo Blume and Josep M. Muñoz.

Foto: Antoni Bernad

A Hatch in the Void
2025-07-01
If a work of art fails to harness the magic in things themselves, if it uses objects only to make them mean something, it has wasted one of its greatest possibilities. When we take an object and make it mean something, what we are doing is confirming ourselves. We are confirming our own concepts of who we are and what the world is. But allowing things to be seen as what they are offers a more open and fertile ground. After all, the unknown is pure adventure.
As part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, the Museu Tàpies has invited Marc Caellas to perform four activations of the exhibition room to give a new life and a new dimension to the materials presented in it, with the aim of rethinking them.

Activations

25.03.2025 – The Background of Things.
Marc Caellas, born in Barcelona, is an artist who works with writing, theatre, performance and curation in hybrid projects that develop into books, plays, installations or public programmes and festivals.
His two most recently published books are Notas de suicidio (La Uña Rota, 2022) and Dos hombres que caminan (Ediciones Menguantes, 2022), the latter written in collaboration with Esteban Feune de Colombi. His previous works include Carcelona (Melusina, 2011), Caracaos (Melusina, 2015), Drogotá (Planeta, 2017), Neuros Aires (Libros del Zorzal, 2020) and Teatro del bueno (Teatron.Tinta, 2015).
He has participated in numerous national and international literature and performing arts festivals, including: Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, Festival de Palco e Rúa de Belo Horizonte (Brazil), Bienal do Livro de São Paulo, FILBA (Buenos Aires), Festival Estival (San Martín de los Andes, Argentina), FIT de Cádiz, TNT Festival (Terrassa), IDEM Casa Encendida Festival (Madrid), Escenas do Cambio Festival (Santiago de Compostela), Kosmopolis Festival at CCCB (Barcelona), Festival de las Ideas (Madrid), Cuéntalo Festival (Logroño), Nus Festival (Barcelona), Open Heart Festival (Lanzarote), Meet You (Valladolid) and WIM (Frías, Burgos), among others.
He was resident artist at the Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque (Madrid), Tokyo Arts and Space, Nau Côclea (Saus, Girona) and Can Timoner (Mallorca).
He has twice been awarded the Ministry of Culture’s grants for literary creation, received Iberescena grants for theatrical co-production and was a finalist for the BBVA Award for the best play with Suicide Notes.
He has taught courses on creative writing, theatre creation and new dramaturgy at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Centro de Cultura Contemporánea Condeduque, University of Barcelona, Universidad Central de Venezuela, Universidad de los Andes and Universidad del Atlántico.

01.07.2025 – Offering to the Earth
In July the Earth is thirsty. It needs feeding. Offering to the Earth is a ritual of Andean origin based on reciprocity. The gods are thanked for the produce received and presented with an offering to satisfy their hunger and thirst.
Invited by Marc Caellas, conservationist and activist for Amazonia, Magdalena Ruiz, will conduct a ritual of gratitude. This event—the second in the series A Hatch in the Void, conceived by Caellas as part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World—aims to question and broaden the traditional reading of the exhibition by creating spaces where the works are counterposed with contemporary thought and opened up to a range of interpretations.

Offering to the Earth
2025-07-01 18:00 - 19:00
In July the Earth is thirsty. It needs feeding. Offering to the Earth is a ritual of Andean origin based on reciprocity. The gods are thanked for the produce received and presented with an offering to satisfy their hunger and thirst.
Invited by Marc Caellas, conservationist and activist for Amazonia, Magdalena Ruiz, will conduct a ritual of gratitude. This event—the second in the series A Hatch in the Void, conceived by Caellas as part of the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World—aims to question and broaden the traditional reading of the exhibition by creating spaces where the works are counterposed with contemporary thought and opened up to a range of interpretations.

Muérdago
2025-07-03 19:00 - 20:00 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies has invited Adelaida to dialogue with the creative universe of Marta Palau, in a concert conceived to show how the singer and artist share ritualistic aspects that connect the body with nature and ancestral memory. Through organic sonorities and all-encompassing atmospheres, Muérdago [Mistletoe] evokes transitional, transformational space, similar to the symbolic territories that Palau creates with primal materials like wood, earth or botanical fibres. The creations of both artists appeal to sensorial and mystical experience, where matter and gesture become channels for a deep-set connection with both the sacred and the earthly.
Adelaida lives and works on the full moon. A mermaid of heaven and hell, she lifts her voice in an incantation. Born and raised in Barcelona, she has a degree in Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins, which enlivens the performative nature of her endeavour. Her classical voice training at the Orfeó Català is patent in her innovative, personal compositional language, with which she explores the limits of the voice and its expressive and ritualistic potential. On stage, she transforms into the phoenix, then from phoenix into songster, from songster to sea nymph, and so on.
This Catalan singer-songwriter and producer has recently released her second album, Muérdago. The recording poses many questions and provides few answers. Infinite, delicate mantras of sound distinguish this ASMR labyrinth, bursting with lamentations and wounded desires. It features everything from choral ambiences to darker, baroque electronics, with her voice always front and centre. The album features the collaboration of Catalan producers MANS O and Pura Cadera, and was mixed by Rashad Becker. The live presentation took place at Sonar 2024, with a hypnotic, moody performance, and since then Adelaida has been touring in Europe and, more recently, in Mexico.
Adelaida made her debut with Cántaro [Jug], an album of endless vocal layers done with LANAV, and released in September 2022. It was featured in Primavera Sound in 2022 and 2023, Eufònic 2022 at the Fundació Joan Miró, the Festival BAM 2023 and She Makes Noise 2023, amongst many other performances.

© Bo Bannink

Llorenç Barber. L’espai alliberat [Liberated Space]
2025-07-08 19:30 - 21:00 | Jardins de Rubió i Lluch, c. Hospital, 56, Barcelona
Extramurs is an artistic project by the Museu Tàpies that conceives the city as a space of intervention and mediation. With a pluralistic, multidisciplinary approach, the project encourages inter-institutional dialogue, along with dialogue with public space and the environment. Featuring the ongoing collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and the Festival Grec, Extramurs contributes to a rethinking of the role of the institution from a more holistic perspective, through interventions and activities that respond to contemporary demands, encouraging new community narratives in urban space. Inspired by concepts of situated knowledge, this spirit advances reflection on how we mediate our surroundings, and how we might inhabit the world in a more conscious, integrating way. At the same time, the gesture of considering the walls of public space as the carriers of residents’ voices, spaces where collective discourses are materialised and where shared experiences find new meanings, connects us directly with the thought of Tàpies.
Held annually, each edition of Extramurs is presented in the public space, coinciding with the Festival Grec. For the 2025 edition, the artist Elena del Rivero has been invited to develop the project Transiting La Quema, curated by Mateo Feijóo. The proposal is grounded in an intense process of collaborative research and production on the topic of the burning of the artist’s first works, performed as a cleansing gesture.
The installations conceived by Del Rivero as part of the Extramurs project, in collaboration with students from EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona, will be shown on the façade and interior of the Museu Tàpies, as well as at Basílica Santa Maria del Pi, Centre d’Art La Capella, the Teatre Grec gardens, Galeria Senda and Loop Barcelona. The exhibition includes photographs, collages, objects and an illuminated sign. The cartography of these intervened spaces invites us to reflect on the resilience of human and social structures, as well as on the dialogue between past and present, accentuating the tensions and continuities that define history in the construction of the contemporary city.
The inaugural event of La Quema takes place at the Rubió i Lluch Gardens with the concert L’espai alliberat, by Llorenç Barber, a musician, composer, musicologist, bell-ringer and pioneer of sound art in Europe. This visual and sound artist, recognised for introducing minimalist music to Spain, has created a portable set of bells used for the development of his own performance technique. Barber’s bell concerts have been held in over two hundred cities in twenty different countries. He has done concerts for the closing ceremonies of three cultural capital years (Lisbon, Copenhagen and Stockholm), and his performances have featured at biennial exhibitions and art fairs in Japan, France, Thailand and Brazil, while inaugurating two separate Heads of State and Government Meetings (in Salamanca and Rome).
The sound of bells brings us to the world of Elena del Rivero, an international artist committed to the exploration of reparation and memory. We invite you to reflect with us on the resilience of human and social structures and on the dialogue between past and present, accentuating the tensions and continuities that define history in the construction of the contemporary city.

With the collaboration of students from Conservatori Municipal de Música de Barcelona, Fundació Conservatori del Liceu, Escola de Música l’Antàrtida de Barcelona, Escola Municipal de les Arts de Santa Perpètua de la Mogoda and the musical band La Valenciana, and the support of ESMUC.

A coproduction of the Festival Grec de Barcelona 2025 and the Museu Tàpies

Extramurs is an initiative of the Museu Tàpies with the collaboration of EINA Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona and festival Grec, with the complicity of Centre d’Art La Capella, Basílica Santa Maria del Pi, Galeria Senda and Loop Barcelona.
Artist: Elena del Rivero
Curator: Mateo Feijóo
The realization of Elena del Rivero – La Quema, at Galicia, promoted by A Casa do Pozo, had the support of: AECID and Fundación Cañada Blanch

Thirteen Over Zero. Ritual-action-performance
2025-07-17 19:00 - 19:30 | Museu Tàpies
Tattoo the sacred numbers of the Maya civilisation (13 and 0) on the upper right side of the chest. Thirteen is the number with the highest energy; zero (0) was used by the Maya long before the Western world used Arabic numerals. Zero is absence, emptiness, nothingness; zero is silence, expanding and stretching the eternity of the Maya civilisation.
In the Maya Cholqi’ij calendar, cycles are made up of 13 weeks and 20 days. It is a sacred calendar with 260 days (13 x 20 = 260). In Maya numerical symbolism, the number 13 is represented by drawing two sticks and three dots. Then a space is left underneath and a conch shell, symbolising zero, is drawn. This creates the number 260, like the 260 days of the Maya calendar, an ancestrally sacred number. Western modernity ignores, secularises, even demonises the number 13; for the Maya, it is sacred. Zero is totality, the beginning and the end; it symbolises the agricultural cycle and is represented by a conch shell.
The ritual-action-performance Thirteen Over Zero involves tattooing the sacred numbers 13 and 0 on Benvenuto Chavajay’s body. It is about dusting off history and activating memory, countless stories, wounds and accumulated legacies. Through this gesture, the Guatemalan artist activates ancestral memory to take a step forward, to heal and embrace all the wounds and legacies. It is about giving history a second chance.
Chavajay offers his skin as a sacrifice and an offering to his ancestors. He wounds his body, opens cracks in it, dropping in tiny black drops and creating lumps and grooves of memory. Scarring, coagulation, blood and charcoal, pain and tattooing.

Benvenuto Chavajay (San Pedro La Laguna, Atitlán Lake, Guatemala) defines himself as a chunchero artist, that is, an observer and intervener of chunches, a term that in Tz’utujil—the artist’s mother tongue—designates discarded objects that have lost their use value. His aim is to identify, ratify and dignify symbolic elements that are part of the history and ancestral knowledge of Maya culture, which he has inherited. In this interview, Chavajay uses his works in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection as a reference to explain how art can be a healing rite in response to the colonial wound. Based on this premise and far removed from the logics of modern Western thinking, in his project El retorno de las almas [The Return of the Souls] the artist embodies the dignification of the indigenous cultures that have been erased from history.
A session of the second edition of the series The Chairs of Tàpies

Opening of the exhibition 'André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of View'
2025-09-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Museu Tàpies
The Museu Tàpies invites you to the opening of the exhibition ‘André du Colombier. A Lyrical Point of View’, curated by Adam Szymczyk
André Paliard Iscu was born in 1952 in Barcelona. In the early 1970s, he studied literature and philosophy in Paris. He chose to change his name to du Colombier (“of the dovecote”), decided to become an artist and held his first individual exhibition, entitled Modestie, Compétence, et Efficacité (Modesty, Competence and Efficiency) at the Galerie Eric Fabre in Paris in 1977. He died in Paris in 2003.
His earliest surviving work is a vertical silver line: a trace of pencil lead on a sheet of black sandpaper. As if left when sharpening a writer’s tool, it is an anti-drawing against the grain. Other early works are sequences of black-and-white photographs documenting dynamic actions with household utensils, or, by contrast, static and exposed objects, defamiliarised under clinical white light.
Standard-sized sheets of reflective Chromolux paper in various colours became over time the artist’s medium of choice, used as a backdrop for handwritten or Letraset texts: odd words, equivocal phrases and cryptic, coded sentences. Another genre in du Colombier’s practice was his mise-en-scènes. Composed of toys, tourist souvenirs and accessories arranged and performed on café tables or in other casual situations, these were often staged for an invited audience of one and never documented.
The exhibition’s titular phrase ‘lyrical point of view’ is a title of the text accompanying du Colombier’s show at Patricia Dorfmann’s gallery in Paris in 1999. It captures the position of an artist whose elusive oeuvre keeps confronting us, free and equal, with the ever-evolving work of interpretation.

André du Colombier, Untitled [Flour and Hot Water Bottle], n.d. 1977
