La Menesunda According to Marta Minujín

The Reina Sofía Museum will be hosting an exhibition in the Nouvel Building (Level 0) from 18 November to 8 March 2027, which reconstructs one of the key works by the Argentinian artist, Marta Minujín, a leading figure of happening, installations and participatory art, considered to be a pioneering milestone in the history of immersive installations in the second half of the 20th century.

Marta Minujín (Buenos Aires, 1943), winner of the Velázquez Prize in 2016 awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Culture for her unique career in contemporary Latin American art, created La Menesunda in 1965 in conjunction with Rubén Santantonín. This installation was designed for the Centre for Visual Arts at the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. The piece radically transformed the relationship between art and spectator.  Considered by these artists as an ephemeral “environment”, it replaced contemplation with multi-sensorial experience, turning the exhibition space into a place for active participation.

La Menesunda condensed many of the concerns running through avant-garde movements of the 1960s: the possibility of entering the mind of a female artist, the rise of mass culture, the media’s incorporation into the artistic language, the central position of the spectator and the possibility of understanding art as a shared practice. Its radicality did not only modify the way in which the exhibition space is conceived, but it also anticipated artistic production methods which still define many of today’s practices.

The version on display at the Reina Sofía Museum is the result of research carried out in 2015 by the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art to reconstruct the work from photographs, footage and other materials, in close collaboration with the artist.  Following its presentation in Buenos Aires and later at the New Museum in New York and Copenhagen Contemporary, this reconstruction, jointly carried out by the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art and Tate Liverpool, is being shown for the first time in Spain.  

The presentation will be accompanied by a documentary journey devoted to the happenings, performances and participatory actions developed by Marta Minujín between 1963 and 1985.  Through photographs, drawings and different archive materials, the exhibition broadly illustrates the intensive process of experimentation that defined more than two decades of Action Art. 

Image Credits:

• Marta Minujín, The Destruction, 1963. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2014.R.20). Donation by the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in memory of Harry Shunk and Janos Kender. Photography: Shunk-Kender © J. Paul Getty Trust