Barcelona’s Shuttered Museum of Censored Art Hits the Road

A museum dedicated to censored art plans to tour its collection by artists like Ai Weiwei, David Wojnarowicz, and León Ferrari worldwide after financial strain saw it close its doors.

Barcelona’s Museu de l’Art Prohibit vacated its building last month, citing disruptions from union protests that led to ‘unsustainable’ losses, but the safehouse for attacked and removed art intends to remain ‘a meeting point to confront censorship’. 

In a parting statement, the less-than-two-years-old museum said the four-month protest disrupted its operations, declaring a 75 percent revenue loss and 95 percent decrease in expected growth that led to a ‘painful and undesired closure’. 

According to Catalan newspaper Ara, the protests followed the museum’s contract termination with a company that employed museum workers requesting better working conditions. 

Union members later took to the streets demanding increased pay and denouncing the museum’s initial dismissal of workers and response to protests as a ‘caricature of itself’.

Museu de l’Art Prohibit housed the collection of Catalan journalist and businessman Tatxo Benet, who started taking in censored art in 2018—after one such work, Political Prisoners in Contemporary Spain by Santiago Sierra, was removed from Madrid fair ARCO. 

Sierra’s photographs of political prisoners with their faces crossed out now sit in Benet’s collection of over 200 items.

Works that may travel include Wojnarowicz’ video A Fire in My Belly (1986–1987), which Smithsonian Institute pulled after outcry about its imagery of ants crawling on a crucifix, and Ferrari’s Jesus crucified to a U.S. Air Force bomber, Western and Christian Civilization (1965).

In the mix is also Eugenio Merino’s silicone effigy of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco inside a Coke fridge (Forever Franco, 2012) and Ai Weiwei’s lego painting of Florentine merchant Filippo Strozzi in Lego (2016) from his portrait series of political dissidents. —[O]