MUACC – Museum of Contemporary Arts and Cultures

The MUACC – Museum of Contemporary Arts and Cultures – is a cultural institution of the University of Cagliari dedicated to the conservation, promotion and enhancement of the University’s modern and contemporary artistic heritage. Housed on the ground and first floors of the historic Palazzo dei Marchesi di Quirra—also known as Palazzo Cugia or Palazzo Nieddu—the museum enjoys a striking panoramic setting in the heart of Cagliari’s Castello district.

The museum regularly presents exhibitions dedicated to the University’s artistic heritage and, in particular, to the corpus of works donated to the University by the artist Italo Antico (b. 1934), whose highly consistent artistic practice has made him one of the most distinctive figures in post-war Italian art. Working primarily in stainless steel, Antico developed a unique sculptural language centred on the expressive potential of line and form.

As the critic Gillo Dorfles observed as early as the 1970s, Antico’s work explores the countless possibilities of a rigorous artistic method, transforming fleeting moments into a perpetual tension between nature and the universal.

The museum currently hosts the photography exhibition Città in/visibili by Mouhamed Yaye Traore, a project supported by Strategia Fotografia 2025, promoted by the Directorate-General for Contemporary Creativity of the Italian Ministry of Culture, as well as the exhibition Generative Habitat, which summarises fourteen years of design and self-construction experiences by the Unica Space Force group.