Elvira Dyangani Ose will cease directing Macba in April earlier than the top of her time period | News from Catalonia | EUROtoday

The director of Macba, Elvira Dyangani Ose, has knowledgeable the museum that she’s going to stop her duties in the beginning of April, coinciding with the closing of the exhibition and the actions that revolve round Project a black planet. The artwork and tradition of Panafrica, an exhibition that he has curated. The resolution comes after the Macba Consortium, which is its governing physique, has knowledgeable her that the present place is incompatible with the route of the second version of the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial, for which she has been appointed, as she herself communicated by means of her social networks only a month in the past. The director, who took over from Ferran Barenblit, had been within the place since 2021, and was the primary girl and the primary racialized particular person to go this establishment devoted to up to date artwork.

After a number of weeks of uncertainty by which it was not recognized whether or not Elvira Dyangani Ose might mix the route of Macba with that of the Abu Dhabi Public Art Biennial over the past months of her mandate, which begins in October, the reply got here final Thursday within the Delegate Commission of the Macba Consortium, which determined that each tasks weren’t reconcilable as a result of the route place requires unique dedication in keeping with her employment contract.

After this detrimental end result, the director despatched a letter this Monday to the Macba employees the place she tells first-hand what the previous couple of months have been like that ended with this abrupt departure. He explains that he knowledgeable the managing physique that he wouldn’t take part within the public name for the longer term inventive route of the museum, after his mandate resulted in July 2026. On that event he additionally reported that he had obtained the provide to affix the Abu Dhabi Art Biennial. With the intention of ending his mandate, with only some months remaining, he requested the compatibility of each positions, which has been denied.

With “the desire for transparency regarding the decisions taken in recent months and after yesterday’s unexpected article,” he quotes in reference to a information merchandise from The Vanguard the place the Consortium’s decision was reported, Elvira Dyangani Ose acknowledges that “it has been an honor and a great responsibility to direct Macba, although not always easy.” At the identical time, the director expresses her gratitude to your entire museum workforce and to all of the individuals who “have made it possible to develop a project committed to art, critical thinking and contemporaneity.”

Likewise, it’s made obtainable to all employees, who quantity round 100, and to the museum’s governing our bodies “to facilitate an orderly and responsible transition during the coming weeks.” The Macba Consortium, which is made up of Barcelona City Council, the Generalitat of Catalonia, the Ministry of Culture and the Macba Foundation, will quickly publish the bases for the election of a brand new deal with.

In an interview with EL PAÍS shortly after taking workplace, the director declared that she wished to confront the construction of the museum, “almost from the 19th century,” to make it extra plural and permeable. He got here to the middle after specializing in initiatives centered on the commentary of the narration of historical past, intervention in public area and the restoration of non-Western narratives.

From a household initially from Equatorial Guinea and born in Córdoba in 1974, she studied on the Autonomous University of Barcelona and Cornell University in New York. After spending time on the Atlantic Center for Modern Art in Las Palmas (CAAM) and the Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art (CAAC), in 2011 he joined the Tate Modern in London, the place he labored along with the African Acquisitions Committee within the buy of works associated to the African diaspora. In 2014 she curated the Gothenburg Biennale of Contemporary Art and since 2018 she directed The Showroom gallery in London. In 2021 it was included within the annual classification of the British journal ArtEvaluation like one among the hundred most influential folks within the inventive universe.