International Museum Day 2022

The Museo Reina Sofía rehangs its Collection with a willingness to offer narratives and experiences which, without seeking to be exhaustive or categorical, speak of the present time through a critical study of the common past. In this new presentation, what takes precedence is not the chronological succession of events and works, but rather the relations and genealogies that, from the present, enable us to weave and uncover. Therefore, eight thematic episodes are put forward and open towards flexible temporalities and interdisciplinary focal points that can be interlinked to create new narrative threads.

This exhibition centres its research on the development and exchange between different purportedly obsolete and anti-technology print media — woodcuts, wood engravings, linocut and lithography — and its role and means of distribution in divergent geopolitical and social contexts.

Curators: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michelle Harewood
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

An exhibition devoted to the work of Alejandra Riera which assays the poetic modes of making place through a recurring image in her practice: a collective canvas, which for this occasion takes the form of a garden in movement. Beyond a retrospective, the exhibition seeks to experiment with the “how” of poetically renewing via a unique and shared experience, gestures and questionings which emerge from the archives of “lieuxdétudes” (places of studies) started by the artist almost three decades ago and unfurled here. The result of individual effort and long-term commitment, these Lieuxdétudes build and sustain affective and sensitive settings, spaces for interrogation and collective breathing.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía

Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall is the outcome of a long collective research process conducted by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía. The exhibition puts forward a survey of graphic art initiatives which have, from the 1960s to the present day, confronted urgent, politically oppressive contexts in Latin America, articulating strategies of transformation and resistance that radically changed art-making, the way in which it established intersubjective links, built communities, and even circulated graphic supports.

Curator: Southern Conceptualisms Network
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía
With the support of: Embassy of the Argentine Republic

Carlos Bunga (Porto, 1976) focused the beginning of his career on painting, before expanding his interests towards three-dimensional experimentations, allowing him to explore the interrelationships between bodies and spaces. A significant part of his work challenges the concept of architecture as a language of power, calling into question deep-seated inertia such as order, solidity and eternity. The graphic documentation of the process ends up the only “ruin”, the only reminder, of architecture that once existed. Modes of doing, and undoing, which underscore at once the constant mutability of the artistic process and the performative character of its social interaction. 

This international encounter, setting out from Graphic Turn. Like the Ivy on a Wall, a collective exhibition stemming from a long research process driven by the Southern Conceptualisms Network, brings together researchers, artists and activists as it looks to foster exchanges to examine art and political graphic action art in Latin America, as much in its recent history as a present characterised by the return of authoritarianism and the loss of civil liberties. The programme comprises tables to debate themes and presents the performance Neither True Nor False, which Argentinian activist and artist Mariela Scafati has been developing since 2013 as an exercise of memory that revisits the last twenty years of her committed practice in serigraphic activism.

Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía and the Southern Conceptualisms Network
Collaboration: Mexican Embassy in Spain, Cultural Diplomacy of Mexico, Cultural Institute of Mexico in Spain and hablarenarte
With the support of: Chile’s National Agency of Research and Development (Proyecto Fondecyt/ANID nº 11201004)