Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA)

As part of the exhibition Critical Episodes (1957-2011). MACBA Collection, Level 0 of the Museum presents two new episodes of the MACBA Collection. In a second section, the episode Voyeurism, Fetishism and Narcissism revisits the effects of the media universe on the construction of a new visuality in the seventies. Authors such as Laura Mulvey identified the narrative conventions of cinema and, together with others, linked them to a mechanism that produced genre codes. From this perspective, the roles of men and women were constructed on the screen, and it was then that the so-called critique of representation emerged. The theory was conceived as a possible substitute for the artist’s individual expression, and favoured a more analytical function in the practice of art.

The conventions of cinema and the screen have accustomed us to look at things from the point of view of the voyeur. How do we look? How does an image affect us? Since the seventies, artists such as Judith Barry, Dara Birnbaum, Dan Graham and Jeff Wall have enacted the seductions and contradictions of the visual paradigm that began in the sixties. Voyeurism, Fetishism and Narcissism delves into this new way of looking.

MACBA will be closed on 25 December and 1 January