Beehave

The Fundació Joan Miró presents Beehave, a project that draws on contemporary artists’ interest in honey bees and the key role they play in the planet’s environmental balance.

The title of the project, a pun merging bees with behaviour, highlights the aim of raising awareness about the role of bees in preserving biodiversity and of educating so that we can know more and develop a better relationship with these insects. With this goal in mind, Martina Millà, the Programming and Projects Director at the Fundació Joan Miró and curator of the project, combines a contemporary art show at the Fundació and a public art programme that spans the entire city of Barcelona from March to June. 24 artists of ten nationalities are presenting close to 60 pieces in the Fundació and at 15 locations in Barcelona. Most of these works have been produced specifically for the project and range from paintings to sculptures, videos, interventions, multimedia installations and performances.

The show includes a series of newly-produced installations that invite visitors to engage in several aspects of the cognitive realm of bees through immersive experiences. In a garden of giant spheres full of flowers created by the artist Jerónimo Hagerman, they are able to experience what bees feel when they pollinate; they encounter the extraordinary anatomic details of bees’ bodies in the work of Anne Marie Maes; they visit the inside of a hive with the interactive installation created by GOIG architecture & Max Celar; they approach the collective work of a hive through Philip Wiegard’s collaborative drawings; they engage in the world of beekeeping in the videos by Marine Hugonnier and Toni Serra (Abu Ali) and the multimedia installation by Àlex Muñoz and Xavi Manzanares, where they experience a real-time connection with a beehive installed on the terrace of the Fundació; they also reflect on the role of bees in our ecosystem’s stability with the sculpture by Luis Fernando Ramírez Celis. The exhibition ends in a room that gathers works by the artists responsible for the urban projects. This room acts as a portal for the city-wide project and invites visitors to continue participating in Beehave beyond the museum.

In front of the Fundació building, the artist Pep Vidal has planted one thousand plant species in order to create the conditions for the bees in Montuïc to produce, literally, thousand-flower honey. The artists Vadim de Grainville & Marcos Lutyens have examined the circadian rhythms of plants to recreate a flower clock in the Laribal gardens in Montjuïc. Artist Joan Bennàssar presents a film in which he shows the hallucinations of a Mexican beekeeper after she had ingested honey that was contaminated with agricultural chemicals. Honey is also the subject of artist Alfonso Borragán’s project—in his case, artificial honey created collectively by a hive of humans. Anna Moreno presents an installation that speculates about a world in which honey is the main exchange value. Artist Luis Bisbe, in turn, has painted a honey window through which viewers will be able to look out upon the city and reconsider the coexistence of humans and bees in urban settings. Gemma Draper proposes six actions in which she will hand out tokens with bee-related symbols. Artist Andrés Vial presents an intervention with vinyl decals on the Trambesòs streetcars. Ulla Taipale has designed a literary visit to the Poblenou cemetery, recapturing the classical notion of bees’ ability to travel between the realms of the living and the dead. Last of all, during the three months that Beehave is held in the city, a giant candle made of beeswax by Joana Cera in collaboration with Toni Garcia will burn in the convent of Sant Agustí.

Beehave has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of the Fundación Banco Sabadell and support from Kunsthaus Baselland and the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona (ICUB), which have enabled it to unfold in its urban dimension.