MACBA unveils 'assertive' and 'decolonial' 2025 program in response to rise of populism

The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) unveiled its 2025 program on Tuesday, featuring three exhibitions with an "assertive" and "decolonial" focus.

The three projects aim to counter the rise of populist movements around the world.

Colombian artist Carlos Motta and Cuban artist Coco Fusco, who resides in the United States, will present their works offering a critical reflection on sociopolitical contexts from a decolonial perspective.

The museum's major international exhibition will be Projecting a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africanism, which will explore cultural manifestations of Pan-Africanism on a grand scale, with 350 works by over a hundred artists from 80 countries.

The new season at MACBA focuses on issues that have been "marginalized" or even "hidden," according to the museum.

"The exhibitions reveal omissions and silences in the history of art that nevertheless permeate today's society."

Pleas of Resistance

Carlos Motta's Pleas of Resistance runs from February 21 to October 26. It showcases over twenty-five years of the artist's practice, combining early photographic self-portraits with more recent performances and video installations.

The exhibition addresses issues such as forced migration, political violence, queer themes, HIV/AIDS, civil rights struggles in Latin America and the Caribbean, and dissident identities. His works challenge official narratives of colonialism, military dictatorships, neofascism, and related violence, in a continuous journey that is always blasphemous, bodily, and political.

I Learned to Swim on Dry Land

I Learned to Swim on Dry Land by Coco Fusco, on show from May 22 to October 26, presents a series of interventions questioning cultural, political, and economic colonization processes.

The exhibition will explore Fusco’s multifaceted approach in a back-and-forth journey between Cuban and U.S. countercultures.

Fusco’s works invite viewers to reconsider history from a decolonial perspective, proposing alternatives for building a future in which the fight for justice and equality takes center stage.  The exhibition will also be presented at El Museo del Barrio in New York in the final quarter of 2025.

Black Planet 

Projecting a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Pan-Africanism is a major international exhibition that will run from November 6, 2025 to April 6, 2026.

It is set to be the first large-scale exhibition to explore the cultural manifestations of Pan-Africanism from the 1920s to the present day, curated by MACBA director Elvira Dyangani Ose, along with Antawan Byrd, Adom Getachew, and Matthew S. Witkovsky.

Developed jointly with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Barbican Centre in London, and the KANAL Centre Pompidou in Brussels, the exhibition will feature nearly 350 works by over a hundred artists.

The exhibition will tour the four institutions until spring 2027.

In Barcelona, it will also explore the impact, presence, and influence of Pan-Africanism in Catalonia and Spain.

Thirty Years of MACBA

Towards the end of the year, celebrations for MACBA’s 30th anniversary will begin, with a program of special activities and events starting on November 28, coinciding with the exact date of the museum's inauguration.

The 30th Anniversary Collection exhibition will run for exactly one year, until November 28, 2026.

Curated by the head of the MACBA Collection, Claudia Segura, and Núria Montclús, the show will celebrate three decades of commitment to the "critical and transformative potential of artistic production and research."

Works by artists who have been part of the collection will engage in dialogue with newly acquired pieces.

It will include works by Joan Ponç, Jean-Michel Basquiat, El Palomar, Ocaña, Esther Ferrer, Dias & Riegwig, Zush, William Kentridge, Eulàlia Valldosera, Rineke Dijkstra, Helio Oiticica, Josefa Tolrà, Àngels Ribé, Tacita Dean, and Onofre Batxiller.