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Nacho Criado (Mengíbar, Jaén, 1943 – Madrid, 2010) is considered one of the most important figures in the last 40 years of experimental art in Spain. The Palacio de Velázquez, one of the Museum's venues in Parque del Retiro, offers a retrospective of his work, providing insight into the multitude of media, practices and homages present in his art, and also their material realization. The Palacio de Cristal, the other Reina Sofía venue in the park and the second site of the retrospective, reconstructs the 1991 exhibition Piezas de agua y cristal, where cultivated mushrooms exemplify the 'collaborating agents' that give this exhibition its name.

Conversation with Lynne Cooke, the exhibition curator, and the artist Sharon Hayes (Baltimore, Maryland, 1970). Using methodological and conceptual strategies drawn from various spheres of discourse, Hayes' projects explore the relations between history, politics and language, using performances, videos and installations to create a collective imaginary. These processes of documenting a historical event end up conditioning the gaze of the individual, leading to a critical reflection about the frictions generated between the public and the private.

Conversation with Lynne Cooke, the curator of the exhibition devoted to the German artist Rosemarie Trockel. Trockel's work explores different methods and a wide range of materials, thereby eluding classification. Her creations question the legitimizing categories of art, social order and gender identities. Also, in this collection, Trockel gives her attention to lesser known artists, chosen out of the empathy she feels for the frankness and inventiveness with which they look at questions that she too asks herself.

In this video, Walter Grasskamp, art historian and critic, and Hans Haacke himself present the exhibition Castles in the air. Associated with North American conceptual art and a pioneer of what is known as institutional critique, Haacke, through his work, questions museum, political and economic institutions in the context of today's globalized society.

Conversation with Daina Augatis, curator of the exhibition, and the artist Antoni Muntadas on Entre/Between. This exhibition, structured into nine blocks or "thematic constellations" is a complex, non-linear reading of Muntadas' work. In it numerous collaborative and multi-disciplinary projects are shown, from the early years to the piece Situación 2011, created especially for this exhibition.

Conversation with the artist Soledad Sevilla about her exhibition in the Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid's Parque del Retiro, where she created an installation specifically for this site. Language, geometry, light and the spectator's experience are some of the elements that contribute to this exhibition. A large aluminum structure and a series of polycarbonate panels recreate a night sky dotted with linguistic signs.

João Fernandes and François Piron, the exhibition curators, analyse the influence of Raymond Roussel, an essential figure in the history of literature and a source of inspiration for visual artists and authors from other disciplines. The legacy of Roussel's poetic-literary universe permits a transversal reading of the history of 20th century art.

Manuel J. Borja-Villel, the exhibition curator, presents the artist Elena Asins' work and discusses the key elements of her role and her contributions to the history of art. In addition, the artist herself contextualizes her work following her collaboration with the Computation Centre, and analyses the multiple media and formats used in her artwork (concrete poetry, drawing, video...).

Roland Groenenboom, curator of the exhibition, and Dominic van den Boogerd, art critic and director of De Ateliers, present in this video the ironic and imaginative work of René Daniëls. Along with his pictorial works, other materials and documents reflect the complex and conceptual work of this Dutch artist, who makes constant references to literature and daily life.

In this video Lynne Cooke and Christian Rattemeyer, the curators of the exhibition, present the largest retrospective show to date on the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti. Initially linked to the Arte Povera movement, Boetti soon began to develop conceptual work, based on ideas concerning duality, the sensory and time, examined with the subjectivity of the artist.

Conversation with the artist Maja Bajevic (Sarajevo, 1967) about her exhibition at Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid's Parque del Retiro. In this project, the artist analyses the consequences of historical and political conflicts and the impact they have on society.

Lynne Cooke, curator of the exhibition, presents the work of this singular, self-taught artist who was born completely deaf in Idaho. The exhibition offers a panoramic vision of the work of James Castle, an artist who invented his own way of showing and telling. Because of his deafness, he never learned to speak but he developed an imaginary all his own, nowadays described in terms such as primitive, marginal or visionary, in an attempt to unravel the complexity of his production.

Teresa Velázquez, curator of the exhibition, presents the work of the Brazilian Lygia Pape, an artist closely linked to the Neo-Concrete movement, which appeared as part of the strong current of renovation and modernism that swept Brazil in the 1950s. This exhibition shows the multidisciplinary nature of the artist's work, in terms of both themes and formats, which range from film to performance art and from painting to books, among others.

In this retrospective, Frances Morris, head of international collections at Tate Modern and curator of the exhibition, presents the work of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, an essential figure in contemporary, post-war art. The exhibition allows visitors to get to know her multiple facets, from her contacts with Pop art, to her art installations and interventions in public spaces.

Jon Bird, curator of the Leon Golub exhibition, explores the contemporary relevance of the artist's painting from various perspectives. First of all, how it brings historical painting up to date; secondly, how it conceives of the body; and thirdly, what the role of the viewer is.

In this interview Jorge Ribalta, the curator of the exhibition A hard, merciless light. The worker-photography movement, 1926-1939, proposes a journey through the documentary practices of the worker movements of the interwar period, emphasizing the appearance of a new notion of photographic modernism, one linked to social movements and the document

Roberto Jacoby is an artist who, through his multiple abandonments of art, nourishes the artistic practice of possibility, moments of tension and new agents. His work begins in the realm of Instituto Di Tella and, in a series of radical episodes, becomes Tucumán Arde (1968). Far from ending there, his subsequent career has dealt with networks, memory and its activations (or obliterations) in the archive.

Económicos, the exhibition by the artist Efrén Álvarez (Barcelona, 1980), outlines a global vision of today's economy as a discipline that caricaturizes itself. Forty drawings and texts by different authors show relationship systems in which the apparent pedagogical intention of the exhibition entails, in practice, looking at what is unproductive, decayed and alienated through work and consumption

The novelist Ricardo Piglia talks about the work of the Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby, in connection with the exhibition Roberto Jacoby, Desire rises from Collapse (Museo Reina Sofía, 25 February to 30 May, 2011). Jacoby's work, explains Piglia, contributes to the formation of two of today's key ideas: the creation of networks, through what Jacoby calls technologies of friendship, and the notion of immateriality as a fundamental aspect of contemporary society.

In much of the work by Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, 1973) history ceases to be a practice linked to the past and instead reveals the cracks through which it becomes an activity intimately connected to the present. In this interview he comments on some of his work, hermetic and complex, where the resource of narration becomes something that updates both history and its visual forms. The ideas of monument, public sculpture and photomontage are modern archetypes that Mendizabal uses as a possibility of that which is collective.

Re-opening the Palacio de Velázquez after more than five years, the Museo Reina Sofía's new exhibition venue presents the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Antoni Miralda (Barcelona, 1942). Over more than four decades of production, the Catalan artist's work has been characterized by a continuous and ironic demystification of the art object, joined by an anthropological analysis of the systems of consumption and ritual and ethnological presentation of the codes that articulate contemporaneity.

Presentation last 18 February 2010 of The Tattooed Skeleton, title of the performance with which the U.S.-born artist Suzanne Lacy takes on, in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofía, the topic of domestic violence against women, on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, 24th and 25th November 2010. Also involved in the presentation are María José Martín Bernabé, from the Government Delegation against Gender-based Violence; Ana María Pérez del Campo, from the Federation of Separated and Divorced Women; Covadonga Naredo and Esther Cerro, from the Federation of Progressive Women; and Sara Vicente, from the Commission for Research on the Abuse of Women.

Presentation of The Potosí Principle by the curatorial team, Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann. The Potosí Principle is a research, publication and debate project organized by Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, May 12th - September 6th, 2010), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, October 7th, 2010 - January 3rd, 2011), and Museo Nacional de Arte and Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folclore (La Paz, February-May 2011). The Potosí Principle questions modernity by narrating it from the vantage point of the other, introducing the process of European emancipation as a cycle of global domination and exploitation which, having started in the 16th Century, is still ongoing.

An itinerary with Lissette Lagnado and Maria Berrios through the exhibition Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, Journeys, and Morphologies (Museo Reina Sofía, May 5 - August 23). Through a series of topics, this conversation poses a specific kind of Modernity, which is neither alternate nor central, but which shows the possibilities of playful and poetic transformation of society and cases of collective pedagogy in architectonic episodes in Latin America in the secord third of the 20th Century.

In relation to Thomas Schütte. Hindsight, this video presents a tour around the exhibition through a dialogue with the German artist, along with Julian Heynen, art historian and director of Kunstsammlung of Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Lynne Cooke, curator of the exhibition and deputy director of Museo Reina Sofía.

Itinerary of the exhibition Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement, held in Museo Reina Sofía from March 31 to July 12, 2010. Through a selection of works by Mexican artist, the exhibition examines the limits of the art system and the presence of the other in the space of an art institution. Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) produced his work in a confinement of more than three decades in a mental hospital, making his own painting materials and exploring a unique iconography that refers to the estrangement between two worlds, the origin of rural and indigenous Mexico and destination, a United States in the midst of a full-blown industrial development. The question posed by the exhibition is the lack of a non-reductionist vocabulary for understanding artistic categories beyond those undertaken by history of art.

Tacita Dean: The Friar's Doodle (Museo Reina Sofia, Monastery of Silos March 23-June 27) is a site-specific exhibition reviewing the history of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos beyond its monumentality, classifying the traces of everyday life in the scribbles and graffiti of the columns of the cloister. In this inventory, the British artist shows a varied set of uses of space, such as as a witness to the work of the stonemasons, the rudimentary medieval games or the use the monastery as a shelter, building a fragmented and collective cultural history and relating film and photography with the evocations of minor narratives.

The Season of Celebrarions/ La saison des fêtes is a site-specific installation by Pierre Huyghe at the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro (March 17 to May 31, 2010) where, from a set of plant species in different seasons planted in a circle, the artist reviews the relationship between nature and tradition, myth, and celebration, recalling how events and the perception of time are determined by fiction and storytelling. In this video, Huyghe explains this site-specific project in relation to a series of constant lines of work which question time as phenomenology and reenactment as a mechanism for representation.