IBEX36 | Bienal Mayrit | Madrid 2026

IBEX36. Cultura material = Valor global is an installation presented as part of the fourth edition of the Bienal Mayrit, (Super)Models, curated by Saúl Baeza and VISIONS BY. The work activates the collection of the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, linking its objects to the economic, technological, and political infrastructures that extract resources, energy, data, and wealth from territories and populations. In direct reference to Spain’s IBEX 35 stock market index, IBEX36 adds the museum as its 36th company, treating cultural heritage as just another asset to be traded.

A custom-built website takes a selection of the museum’s permanent collection and measures the materials each object is made of against their current market value, presented as a data visualization interface modeled after a day trader’s dashboard. In the gallery, Saúl Baeza constructed an immersive mise-en-scène: multiple screens, a desk, and a live ticker tracking the fluctuating value of cultural heritage in real time.

Under this premise, the collection abandons its heritage value and becomes a reserve of capital, ready to be activated, calculated, and speculated upon. By translating each object into a financial asset, the installation makes visible the total logic of neoliberalism: nothing exists outside the market. Everything is measured, compared, and sold.

The museum ceases to conserve and instead extracts. It ceases to narrate and instead speculates.

An algorithmic model connects the museum’s pieces to the international stock exchange in real time, subjecting them to the volatility of the materials they are made of. The artefacts are contextualized with global geopolitical conflicts—the genocide in Palestine, the war in Ukraine, the war in Iran—as well as with the development of large-scale AI infrastructure and the energy megaprojects that sustain it. The museum is presented as an asset that ceases to conserve and instead extracts, ceases to narrate and instead speculates.

The installation exposes a system already in motion, one in which culture has been definitively subordinated to the logic of accumulation.

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