TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary is a leading international art and advocacy foundation. The foundation’s vision and ethos are expressed through two closely connected areas of work: supporting artists over the long term through the development and production of artworks (commissions), and implementing artist-led projects that explore critical ecological issues, with a particular focus on the ocean and social justice (research).
TBA21 is headquartered in Madrid, where it works in association with the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, and has other key hubs of action in Venice and Portland, Jamaica. All activity at TBA21 is collaborative and fundamentally driven by artists and the belief in art and culture as integral components of social and environmental transformation, ultimately in the service of peace.
For TBA21, art is a complex form of knowledge production: it draws on what is already known while revealing its own limitless, imaginative, uncategorizable nature. Convinced that art can act as a transformative force within society, the Foundation explores new modes of production and presentation designed to catalyze social and environmental change. This new mode of inquiry asks, with real urgency, how artistic practice can step outside the confines of the artworld itself and intervene directly in the public sphere.
The Foundation's Platform for Artistic Research and Action
TBA21–Academy is TBA21’s research and advocacy arm, fostering deeper relationships with the Earth’s hydrosphere and its extended ecologies through the lens of art to activate new forms of care and collective action. Operating as an incubator for collaborative inquiry, research-based artistic production, and environmental advocacy, the Academy works through exhibitions, commissions, fieldwork, residencies, pedagogical programs, and assemblies, emerging from exchanges between art, science, policy, and civic engagement.
TBA21–Academy operates through three interconnected laboratories: Ocean Space in Venice, Organismo developed with Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid, and Convivial Living Lab in Jamaica. Together, they function as situated field stations where art, research, and activism are grounded in specific contexts and aquatic ecologies, developed in close collaboration with local communities while simultaneously thinking at a planetary scale.
Over the last years, TBA21–Academy has increasingly taken on the role of an agent in the world of advocacy: engaging with international forums, supporting experimental governance practices, and working with partners to articulate new legal, cultural, and political frameworks for more just ocean futures.
