iMACBA – Museu d'Art Contemporani de BarcelonaRaval
Collection display of videos by artists from around the world, donated by the Han Nefkens Foundation, where documentary and poetic moving images are shaped by texture, sound and materiality.
On a hilltop in Kabul Province, five boys climb a rock against the wind and blow a plastic trumpet that sounds like a kazoo. The Taliban have banned instrumental music, and toys like this get around it. That's Aziz Hazara's Bow Echo, on five screens, one of seven videos made through the Han Nefkens Foundation's grants and given to MACBA in 2025.
The rest range widely. A Beijing couple learn 1930s Harlem Lindy Hop from TikTok. A deaf father in Recife installs car stereos by feeling the vibrations. Tunisians on the coast facing Sicily talk about trying to reach Italy. Que.es noted the burst of colour after the grainy 1970s Video-Nou tapes nearby.
The runtimes add up to about an hour and a half, and two films take over an hour of it. Watch only the four shortest and you're out in 17 minutes. It's in the general MACBA ticket (€15, free for under-16s and Thursday to Saturday from 6pm), with guided visits on Saturdays from 7 November.
Bow Echo (2019), Aziz Hazara
Five boys brace against the wind on a big rock in the hills of Kabul Province and play a plastic trumpet, shown across five screens for just over four minutes.
Opus One (2020), Hao Jingban
Two screens follow a young Beijing couple studying swing dances on TikTok back to the Harlem dance halls where the Lindy Hop took off in the 1930s.
EBB AND FLOW (2012), Gabriel Mascaro
Rodrigo, a deaf single father in Recife, fits car stereos by feeling rhythm and vibration, filmed in long static shots across 28 minutes.
First Rain, Brise Soleil (2021), Thao Nguyen Phan
A three-screen fable that opens with a man born in 1944 to a Vietnamese father and a Khmer mother, and turns on Saigon's concrete sun screens and the durian fruit.
Rehearsal (2020), Aziz Hazara
In just over a minute, a small Afghan boy on an older boy's shoulders points his fingers at the camera and imitates the burst of an assault rifle.
You want objects on walls: it's seven videos, about 90 minutes of footage, much of it about war and migration.