The exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign in MACBA. Chronicle of a Short Circuit Foretold

Abstract

In 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA) was the scene of one of the most important conflicts of the recent history of Spanish museum institutions. The museum director censored a work of Austrian artist Ines Doujak as part of the exhibition The beast and the sovereign, an incident which had serious effects on the functioning and structure of one of the most important art museums in the country. Moreover, it also revealed the existence of a number of underlying political dynamics that had clouded and conditioned the institution from its inception in the late 1980s especially how its public condition should be defined.