Ines Doujak's The Beast and the Sovereign

The international museum ethics body Cimam (International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art) suffered a blow this week when three major museum directors resigned from the board of the Barcelona-based organisation. 

Abdellah Karoum, the director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Vasif Kortun, the director of research and programmes at Salt in Istanbul, and Charles Esche, the director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, say they are taking a stand against Bartomeu Marí, the president of Cimam. 

In March, Marí resigned as the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (Macba) after a censorship row over a controversial installation on display at the museum, which shows the former Spanish monarch Juan Carlos in a sexual act with a dog. The piece, by the Austrian artist Ines Doujak, was included in the exhibition The Beast and the Sovereign.

Marí initially cancelled the show on the eve of the launch, saying that the installation was “inappropriate and contradictory to the museum's line”. He later recanted, and stepped down; the exhibition opened to the public on 21 March. Two curators at Macba also involved in the show, Valentín Roma and Paul B. Preciado, were dismissed.

In a statement, the three directors say: “We believe Cimam's main task today is to defend as much as is possible this space for debate and to set ethical standards of behaviour towards artists, curators and the public. The recent course of events at Macba and with the board at Cimam have led us to doubt whether our current president can defend those values credibly.”

Esche says: “At the Cimam conference in Tokyo [held earlier this week], the first since Marí’s censorship of the exhibition, we wanted a discussion with the members about the situation around the president.” This was not possible, he adds, saying that they subsequently resigned.

Cimam gives its version of events in a statement posted on its website. It says that “when the events at Macba took place, the board of Cimam asked Marí to give a response, which he circulated to all of the board members. At a Skype meeting on 8 April, it was agreed that he should remain as president.” It was also agreed that a session on the challenges of freedom of expression should be included in the conference.

“A week before the conference, two board members sent a note to the board criticising the content… and circulated a letter about the Macba events attacking the president,” the statement adds. A meeting was held before the conference to ascertain why these board members “were only now raising concerns about the content of the conference and the president”. 

Esche says, however, that over the past six months, the trio has “tried to negotiate a compromise and hoped that Marí would himself step back from the presidency”. Marí remains in post.