Hau (this), here, nearby, is a demonstrative pronoun in Basque. Demonstratives are used to indicate the distance between a speaker and the thing spoken about. They therefore help to orient oneself because they reveal a position. But hau also has different meanings in other contexts. In his essay “The Gift” (1925), the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss writes that hau for the Maoris is the spiritual value given to gifted objects. The definition of a museum is historically determined by its collection, by the public nature of a collection that belongs to everyone and helps to produce knowledge and to imagine a community.

This dual meaning acts as a preamble to a reordering of the museum’s collection that began in the 1950s with the return from Latin America of Mari Paz Jiménez, Jorge Oteiza and Néstor Basterretxea, continuing until the present day and exploring what the theorist Hal Foster dubbed “the return of the real”. It does so through a number of fundamental movements that activate a narrative that is constantly under construction. This presentation brings together more than a hundred works of art, documents and archival materials to explore the contexts that artists helped to construct and from which they worked in the latter half of the 20th century.

Brouchure