The Museu de la Música kicks off the LOOP Festival with the Muted Explosions exhibition.

From November 13 to January 26, the Museu de la Música de Barcelona hosts the launch of the Loop Festival with the exhibition Muted Explosions, showcasing, for the first time in Catalonia, the work of Ukrainian artists and filmmakers Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk.

The 22nd edition of the Loop Festival (Nov 11–24) invites us to explore how different artistic gestures can provoke subtle yet meaningful tremors that, by awakening viewer awareness, may ultimately affect power structures.

The director of the Museu de la Música, Jordi Alomar, celebrated the collaboration with the festival, which began in 2022, saying, “It is the duty of a venue like the Museu de la Música to become embedded in the fabric of the city’s cultural life. This is why collaboration with the video art world, through Loop, is a natural convergence, and I hope it will bear fruit for many years.”

The exhibition will present three recent film pieces: Dedicated To The Youth Of The World II (2019), Dedicated To The Youth Of The World III (2023), and Explosions Near a Museum (2023). These pieces share a common theme of absence and resistance, the coexistence of silence and noise, and the balance of uncertainty and collective determination.

Dedicated To The Youth Of The World II documented the Cxema rave in Kyiv and now stands as an iconic record of Ukraine’s artistic vitality amid an ongoing crisis, also serving as a collective portrait of a wounded and surviving youth.

In contrast, Dedicated To The Youth Of The World III was created under vastly different circumstances. The artists decided to recreate the party in September 2023 under constant threat, focusing on community members who replaced participants of previous raves after a prolonged pandemic and a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The piece Explosions Near the Museum (2023) documents the looting of the Kherson Museum of Local Tradition by Russian invaders in October 2022. Empty display cases and pedestals reflect not only physical loss but also cultural amnesia. Director Jordi Alomar explained, “The inclusion of the film about the looting of the Kherson Museum of Local Tradition by the Russian army highlights both the symbolic strength and fragility of institutions that uphold hegemonic narratives, such as museums. Incorporating this piece within the Museu de la Música brings visibility to the narrative of absences and presences—always mediated by power and its struggles—that underpins any cultural institution, and this Museum is no exception. Music, too, is a wound.”