Culture Collective | Hï Ibiza, Ushuaïa, UNVRS
Indoors until Oct 2026 . Outdoors until May 2027 . Club entry applies
The gist: seventy artists across three superclubs in Ibiza, put there by London's W1 Curates, who think art has no business being locked in galleries. It's a real bet on where art is heading, and last weekend I flew out to speak on one of their panels.
Hey museum rats. This week I bring you some mischief from Ibiza, land of dance, hedonism, the folklore of Atlantis, and as of this summer, Culture Collective.
I was invited by W1 Curates (known for putting contemporary art on public screens) for the Culture Collective Weekend in Ibiza. The event was ran with The Night League and it including live installations, panel talks, and each evening access to one of the club nights.
For me, to talk art amongst clubs and music was really exciting, because dance music has a history of rebellion. Techno came out of Black Detroit in the early eighties, house out of Black and Latino Chicago, vogue out of the ballrooms of Harlem.
Dance has a history of people building somewhere to be free and so both dance and art are liberation. So often, music, fashion and art get filed separately, and things get places into categories of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’, which is all just noise, because taste follows wherever the work is allowed to be shown.
What makes W1 different starts with where it came from. Mark Dale, who founded it, told me he came up through music and fashion rather than the art world, which explains a great deal about how the whole thing is built. They made the technology themselves, and the screens are engineered to hold each artist’s colour palette exactly, which sounds dry until you’ve seen how badly most screens handle a painting. For years the job was convincing blue chip galleries that art on a street could equal art in a white room. That argument is basically over. The gallery at Hï sits in the Dom Pérignon bar on the rooftop terrace, and this summer it held Gagosian represented Sir Michael Craig-Martin. His Music filled a seventy-metre digital rooftop with animated instruments and headphones. Ian Davenport showed too, who pours paint down tilted surfaces and the work is now transported onto digital screens. Marina Abramović was on the roster with ELEMENTS, and though she didn’t turn up herself, her work did. Tinie Tempah gave a talk. Next, some of the work goes to Frieze.
The room itself is worth the trip whenever its an installation like this. Because screens of art that high, combined with reflective walls and a reflective ceiling, give you an Alice in Wonderland effect; its amazing to stand inside and be immersed. And then. on top of that, to be in a room of artists, thinkers, writers, tech heads has an air of optimise and challenge that keeps us on our toes and gives an air of “this is where change happens”… in spaces like this, filled with people unafraid to speak their truth and the courage to take aligned action.
My panel was Women Shaping Culture, with Coco Dávez, the Madrid painter who is known for her graphic portraits, and Olivia Steele, who writes in neon, lines that read like prayers you find in the dark. The three of us talked about how differently we'd each come at it, and what it takes for women to shape culture rather than decorate it. Behind me I played a film I'd made for the weekend, a short trailer of me painting in Ibiza on a quiet beach, all nature and colour, a completely different island to the one everybody pictures.
I left thinking that the direction art is taking is one of bringing people together - literally just getting bums on seats and feet on site. And once you have people together, it’s about curating an emotional experience and storytelling. I don’t think this way of showing art is a gimmick. It makes a world you step into, and if the story is right it can be calming, almost a meditation, or it can be fun and a vibe, the way a good dance track is.
At the end of the evening, there I was, at midnight, stood in a superclub, in front of a wall of light thinking about art, dance, and love in Ibiza.
Museum Rat verdict?
Worth the flight, and you don't even need one. Craig-Martin's work comes to Oxford Street for Frieze in October, so you can see the London end of the same argument for nothing.
Planning Your Visit
Culture Collective, Ibiza: indoor exhibitions run through October 2026, outdoor installations stay until May 2027, across Hï Ibiza, Ushuaïa and UNVRS.
In London: W1 Curates, 161-167 Oxford Street, free and open to the street all year.
Worth knowing: Craig-Martin travels to Oxford Street during Frieze, 14 to 18 October.
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The Museum of Youth Culture, which opened in Camden this summer and is free. It tells the story of illegal rave culture through a soundsystem built by Linett Kamala, the first woman to DJ at Notting Hill Carnival, back in 1985.