Like a Dance of Starlings
By Charlotte Stace
MACBA’s exhibition Like a Dance of Starlings: MACBA Collection – Thirty Years and Infinite Ways of Being reflects on its 30-year journey through a metaphor of starling murmuration - a fluid, collective movement that mirrors how subjectivity and identity evolve.
Rather than offering a chronological retrospective, the show is organised around “connective nodes”: themes like hybrid identity, spiritual worlds, community and ritual. It highlights how identities are shaped not in isolation, but through social struggle, shared experiences and constant transformation.
The exhibition includes around 50 artists from the MACBA Collection - including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Àngels Ribé, Esther Ferrer and Claudia Andújar - plus newly acquired works. It also reaches beyond the museum: three works are displayed in schools via MACBA’s “Out of Storage” programme. The celebration of MACBA’s thirtieth anniversary is an apt moment to take stock and look back over how the museum’s past has shaped its present, as well as a welcome opportunity to appreciate how it has evolved.