Exhibition

Mitsuo Miura arrived to Barcelona from Japan in 1966 with a suitcase in either hand and just a bare few words of Spanish. Armed with his oriental tempo, he sat down on a bench in Plaza de Cataluña to watch how this city by the sea passed by. Ever since, the young Japanese artist never stopped observing each and every one of the landscapes in which his personal life experiences have been played out. And so we could view his exhibitions as invitations to contemplation and displacement, almost always related with wellbeing, memory and pleasure.

Can moving arms, legs, hair be inspiring for a movement, a coming uprising for more joyful and equal ways of living together? Engaged with the precarious moment of taking the stage—a moment which allows for one’s visibility while at the same time disclosing one’s fragility—Portrait of a Movement addresses questions of pleasure, power, and radical difference. Two large film installations form the core of the exhibition: while engaging with dance movements and artistic collaborations, they explore abstraction’s potential for resistance in the face of reactionary politics.

On 2 July 1970, on a public stage in Frankfurt the artist VALIE EXPORT tattooed herself with a garter, a radical transgression of gender stereotypes—given that at the time tattoos were seen as the exclusive purview of men, especially convicts and sailors—but also a case of taking the use of her own body to the extreme, as the artistic action that became a permanent part of her body that would last her whole life long.

There is a signature feature to Hannah Collins’s photos of urban horizons: the sky is always tinted with a strange colour. Like the images over the credits of an imaginary film, this photo captures the feeling that a particular place—whether through premeditated cultural references or a subjective impression—produced in the artist at a certain point in time.

This fountain is made through a twofold transformation of materials sourced from nature. Firstly, marble—the material par excellence of classical sculpture—is a previously cut piece which was perhaps originally destined for industrial use.

Malicious Mischief is the result of exhaustive research into the artist’s life’s work with a view to expanding its narrative and recognition among European audiences, spanning from his early creations on the East coast to his work in the late-90s before he died from AIDS-related illness.