Our Ghosts Live in the Future, the first solo exhibition in Spain by 2023 Joan Miró Prize winner Tuan Andrew Nguyen, is on at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona now through September 24, 2024. The Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) provided lead support for the exhibition and the Prize, which recognizes an artist whose work resonates with the values and honors the legacy of 20th-century Barcelona-born artist Joan Miró.
Find out more about Our Ghosts Live in the Future, which features video installations and sculptures made from remnants of artillery shells and bombs from the Vietnam War.
Nguyen has visited local classrooms to engage with students, and in his remarks at the opening event, Programs Co-Director Alexandros Kambouroglou highlighted the importance of the civic aspects of the prize and exhibition.
“Art may stubbornly resist being parsed in practical terms, but that does not mean it can’t serve a practical purpose,” he said.
“As we wrote in our foreword for the exhibition catalogue, a major focus for SNF is how we, collectively, can help mend our fraying civic fabric and bolster productive, respectful engagement across divisions and borders. We see public dialogue as the lynchpin of these efforts, and museum galleries are too often overlooked as potential incubators of dialogue.
“At the most fundamental level, encountering art can help us reflect on what it means to be human. It can help us exercise our capacity for empathy, one of the most underrated skills for the health of democracies. It can help us connect with each other across our differences and help us step sideways out of the occasionally sclerotic frame of our own worldview.
“Among the many alchemies art can perform is that it can be polarizing in a way that doesn’t further polarize us away from one another. Even when it provokes spirited disagreement, it gets us talking to each other.”