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Macba censures its own exhibition

A work by an Austrian artist which features former King Juan Carlos withdrawn by museum director

Storm clouds hang over the Barcelona's mu­seum of con­tem­po­rary art (Macba) fol­low­ing the de­ci­sion of mu­seum di­rec­tor Bar­tomeu Marí to with­draw a sculp­ture which de­picts the for­mer king of Spain being sodomised by a Bo­li­vian peas­ant ac­tivist woman and a dog. The work is by artists Ines Dou­jak and John Barker, of Aus­trian and British na­tion­al­ity re­spec­tively and had pre­vi­ously been pub­li­cally ex­hib­ited in Brazil. The piece, called Haute Cou­ture 04 Trans­port, was with­drawn as Marí con­sid­ered it to be of­fen­sive and “con­veys a mes­sage that could be harm­ful to the Macba”. Marí claimed that his de­ci­sion was co­her­ent with the mu­seum's poli­cies. The ex­hi­bi­tion is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween the mu­seum and Stuttgart's Würt­tem­berg Kuntsverein. The cu­rat­ing com­mis­sion in­cludes two ex­perts who have had a lengthy as­so­ci­a­tion with the mu­seum and one of them, Va­lentín Roma, ex­pressed his sur­prise at the move, es­pe­cially with the tim­ing of the with­drawal and the na­ture of the cen­sure.

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