The Argentine Pop Art legend globalizes her immersive vision in a bold reinterpretation of her participatory legacy, connecting museums from Buenos Aires to Saudi Arabia, asserting the enduring power of conceptual spectacle.
The art world is witnessing a major global statement from Marta Minujín, an artist whose career has spanned six decades of relentless conceptual exploration and spectacular public engagement. Her latest project, which culminates in an inaugural light installation at the prestigious National Museum of Decorative Arts in Madrid on November 27, 2025, is far more than a single exhibition. It is a carefully orchestrated, simultaneous multi location event that underscores her commitment to breaking down geographical and artistic barriers, proving that the principles of sixties conceptual art can be radically applied to the complexities of the digital present.
This major undertaking, titled ‘Let’s Play. Juguemos en el mundo’ (Let’s Play in the World), functions as a pivotal chapter in the fifth edition of BIENALSUR, the international Contemporary Art Biennial of the South. The choice of the Madrid museum, a repository of historical European decorative arts, is strategically provocative. Minujín’s immersive luminous environment, characterized by her signature use of color and light, is designed to generate a sensory overload that challenges the very notion of historical reverence. By placing ephemeral, participatory contemporary art within a rigid, traditional setting, the artist invites a dialogue about the transformation of aesthetic value over time and the role of play in subverting institutional seriousness.
The Three Pillars of Global Articulation
The genius of the ‘Let’s Play’ project lies in its decentralized structure. The Madrid installation serves as one point in a triangulated global network, with parallel exhibitions opening simultaneously at the MUNTREF Contemporary Art Center Hotel de Inmigrantes, in Buenos Aires, and at SAMoCA (Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art), in Riyadh. This triad is not merely a logistical feat; it is a conceptual statement on the interconnectedness of global culture, a theme central to Minujín’s work since her time in the experimental art scenes of New York and Paris.
In each location, Minujín employs the core vocabulary that has defined her career: the exuberant use of color, the energy of neon light, the softness of tactile, inflatable forms, and, crucially, the reliance on direct public interaction. Yet, these familiar elements are filtered through a contemporary lens, incorporating digital and sound elements that update the aesthetic for a new generation. The inherent flexibility of her work, which allows her to adapt a singular concept across vastly different cultural and architectural landscapes, speaks volumes about the universal appeal and durability of her artistic language.
Buenos Aires: Reimagining the Ephemeral
The exhibition in her native city, Buenos Aires, offers a deep historical echo. Located at the former Hotel de Inmigrantes, the MUNTREF exhibition features ‘Implosión!’, a large scale digital cube defined by Minujín’s recognizable striped pattern and accompanied by an original, specific soundtrack. This piece explicitly references her 1973 work, Soft Gallery, first presented in Washington. That earlier work was a seminal piece that explored texture and the dematerialization of the traditional gallery space by substituting hard walls with soft, textile surfaces.
By revisiting the theme of softness and texture through a digital medium in ‘Implosión!’, Minujín is not simply nostalgic. She is analyzing how the conceptual strategies of the seventies, which sought to remove the aura of permanence from art, can be transferred and sustained in the context of twenty first century technology. The digital cube, while physically solid, uses light and pattern to suggest endless, shifting boundaries, maintaining the original spirit of fluidity and flux that she pioneered decades ago. It acts as an archival self reference that simultaneously pushes forward, asking whether digital light can possess the same tactile emotional resonance as felt or foam.
Riyadh: Migration and Sensory Translation
The installation in Riyadh, ‘Escultura de los sueños, rayas y colores’ (Sculpture of Dreams, Stripes, and Colors), presents another layer of conceptual complexity. This work is an inflatable, walkable sculpture belonging to her iconic series, ‘Golosinas emocionales’ (Emotional Candies). This series, known for its playful, brightly colored, often large scale vinyl forms, transforms simple tactile pleasure into art.
Critically, the Riyadh piece is layered with an accompanying soundtrack of South American bird songs. Minujín describes this specific sensory overlay as a “poetic migration.” This designation is highly interpretive: it is not the artist herself migrating, nor the physical artwork, but the essence of a South American soundscape and aesthetic being transported and contextualized within a Gulf context. The work thus becomes a temporary, transportable cultural embassy, using soft sculpture to create an inclusive, momentary refuge that transcends the physical and political boundaries separating the continents. It embodies the BIENALSUR ideal of creating an artistic bridge between the global North and South, East and West.
The Minujín Legacy: Conceptual Foundations
To fully appreciate the significance of this triple exhibition, one must understand the foundation of Minujín’s career, which has consistently operated at the intersection of Pop Art’s celebration of mass culture and Conceptual Art’s focus on the idea over the object. Arriving on the international scene in the early 1960s, Minujín quickly established herself as a radical pioneer of the happening, the performance, and the environmental installation.
In 1963, her infamous La Destrucción saw her burn and shred her own works, an aggressive dismissal of the commercial gallery system that predated many similar European and American actions. This anti materialist stance culminated in 1965 with La Menesunda, a collaborative immersive labyrinth that became a cultural sensation in Buenos Aires. Viewers passed through various rooms designed to trigger distinct sensory, psychological, and even mildly shocking experiences, fundamentally reshaping the audience’s expectation of what art could be. La Menesunda demonstrated that the real artwork was the lived, shared, communal experience.
This focus on the collective experience found its most powerful political expression in the post dictatorship era. Following the return to democracy in Argentina, Minujín created El Partenón de libros (The Parthenon of Books) in 1983, a life size replica of the Parthenon constructed entirely out of books that had been banned during the military regime. Once exhibited, the public was invited to dismantle the structure and take the books, turning the artwork into a functional, celebratory act of democratic reclamation and free expression. This single project cemented Minujín’s place not just in art history, but in the political and cultural memory of a nation.
A Global Art Iconography
Minujín’s reputation was solidified through her international connections, notably her friendship and collaboration with Andy Warhol during her time in New York. Their joint performance pieces, though often playful, demonstrated the fluidity of boundaries between the emerging Latin American avant garde and the mainstream New York Pop scene. This cross fertilization helped Minujín gain inclusion in the permanent collections of elite global institutions, including the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museo Reina Sofía, affirming her stature as an enduring global iconoclast.
Her accolades, including the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship and the Konex de Brillante in Argentina (2022), are not merely recognition of her past work, but of her continuous intellectual vitality. She has consistently challenged the art market’s emphasis on scarcity, preferring instead to create events built on excess, generosity, and public consumption, whether it be through giving away thousands of books or sharing massive amounts of local delicacies in her ephemeral food sculptures like El Obelisco de pan dulce (The Pan Dulce Obelisk) (1979).
BIENALSUR and the Humanistic Framework
The BIENALSUR context, under the artistic direction of Diana Wechsler, provides the essential humanistic framework for Minujín’s sprawling new work. The biennial is a remarkable, horizontally structured project managed by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), operating as a non commercial, decentralized network connecting seventy cities across five continents. Its mission is fundamentally collaborative, aimed at fostering critical sensitivity and transcending the traditional hegemonic power structures of the global art market.
Wechsler emphasized that Minujín’s ‘Let’s Play’ project functions as one of the autonomous chapters within this extensive global network. The biennial views its artistic interventions not as isolated events, but as threads in a vast, global cultural conversation that spans the globe. By linking these three specific locations Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Riyadh Minujín effectively maps the philosophical ambition of BIENALSUR onto a concrete, spectacular artistic experience.
The enduring power of Minujín’s approach is her ability to transform spectacle into genuine participation. The installations are designed to be temporary, yet the sensory and psychological impact they aim to produce is intended to be permanent, stored in the collective memory of the participants. This commitment to the ephemeral yet profound shared experience is the ultimate realization of the conceptual art she championed. The light installation in Madrid, set to engage audiences on November 27, thus serves as a beacon for a renewed commitment to global, participatory art, reminding us that art is truly made complete only through the act of play and shared discovery, a principle she beautifully articulates in the full programming guide for the fifth edition of the Biennial of Contemporary Art of the South.
