MA Students Attend Landmark Madrid Opening of History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme

As part of the Race/Place: Exotic/Erotic Special Subject, students from UCL’s MA programme travelled to Madrid to attend the opening of History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme: Dumile Feni’s African Guernica at the Museo Reina Sofía. 

During the visit, they explored the exhibition alongside course tutor and curator Tamar Garb, and attended a powerful musical response to African Guernica by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng, staged in the museum’s auditorium.

History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme is a new programme at the Museo Reina Sofía that seeks to create a dialogue between Guernica by Pablo Picasso and other significant works from different historical and cultural contexts that share thematic or visual parallels. 

In its first instalment, curated by Tamar Garb, Picasso’s iconic anti-war painting is presented for the first time alongside African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni, a key figure in African modernism. Emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid, Feni’s large-scale charcoal drawing is deeply biographical and echoes Picasso’s work not only in its title but also in its formal language, including expressive distortion, monochromatic tones, spatial dislocation and the merging of human and animal forms. 

Both works employ monumental scale to foreground the brutality of war, discrimination and oppression, despite being created in distinct geopolitical contexts i.e. the Spanish Civil War and apartheid-era South Africa. Although widely exhibited in South Africa, African Guernica has never previously travelled abroad; its presentation here invites visitors to reflect on the resonances and divergences between the two works while also encountering additional pieces by Feni. 

The series, which takes its title from a phrase often misattributed to Mark Twain, consists of interventions within the museum’s collection that juxtapose Guernica with works from other times and places, framed by art historical scholarship.

Read about this exhibition in The Guardian.

 The exhibition runs from 25 March to 22 September 2026.