Activities

An analysis of the relationships of feminism across history, its affirmation as a political approach after the 2017 struggles and its impact on current transformations of capitalism form the aim of this lecture.

Across a large part of the planet, the feminist movement is inexorably rising to the fore in the transformation of political action and in the postulate of other, more equal and less patriarchal ways of inhabiting the world.  

Created in 1982, the Prelinger Archives form the largest collection of international ephemeral cinema, with over 60,000 advertising, propaganda, educational, and amateur films, as well as home movies and American landscape films shot across the length and breadth of the 20^th century.

Caja de resonancia (Sound Box), an archive of texts, voices, video and performances that searches for the multiple forms radiating contemporary Latin American poetics, is the focal point of the eighth edition of the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme Documents, which revolves around independent artist publications, platforms, networks and publishing spaces, in addition to the potential of archive to reinvent the narratives of art and its ecosystem.

The reappearance of Native Americanness as a displacement and break-away from a modernity in crisis in 1970s and 1980s Latin American art is the subject of this encounter, made up of a lecture by Mexican artist and theorist, Mariana Botey, followed by a conversation with Peruvian researcher and feminist activist, Elisa Fuenzalida.  

Museo Reina Sofía presents a selection of solos, held across two sessions, by Lucinda Childs, a pre-eminent choreographer from so-called minimalist dance and founder of New York’s Judson Dance Theater.

This edition of Intervals, a series which screens and presents recent films, features The Spy Within, a documentary essay on friendship and betrayal during the Years of Lead in Spain and terrorism in the Basque Country. The film narrates the relationship between Juan Gutiérrez, a mediator between the Spanish State and ETA, and his closest collaborator, Roberto Flórez, who turns out to be a spy for Spain’s Secret Services. Both sessions feature a presentation and talk by Juan Gutiérrez, the writer Edurne Portela, and the film-makers. 

The struggles in different corners of the planet with feminisms at the forefront go beyond traditional categories in readings of social movements. Putting into practice ‘the personal is political’ and reshaping our understanding of the political, the feminist tide pulses and proliferates on a global scale with its persistent iterations and capillary potential for dissemination and influence.

The research policy advocated by the Study Centre seeks to function as a collaborative springboard between research groups and independent debate. This approach is behind an encounter, organised with research+rs from the CRUSEV group, to publicly present the results of the European research project Cruising the Seventies, a reformulation of the channels through which the desires and practices of dissident bodies flowed in the late period of Francoism and the Transition to democracy in Spain.

This conference, organised inside the framework of the exhibition The Poetics of Democracy. Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition, centres on the imaginary of the Transition period in Spain via leading figures with specific artistic and activist experience of transitional counterculture, as well as current researchers and artists.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a new series of publications under the title Carta(s) which seeks to broaden the editorial format of the debates that unfold in the institution and beyond. Carta(s), the result of a joint project between the Museo’s Editorial Activities and Public Activities Departments, looks to draw attention to the reverberations between initiatives driven and welcomed by the Museo’s different lines of research and artistic and critical production. The first three recently published volumes include content that was intended for the journal carta, now transformed into this series.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the first edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which, over two days, brings together presentations in a range of formats (stage pieces, performance lectures, actions, readings, conversations). The programme issues from the research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied directly to or engage in dialogue with the area of choreography and performance.

This encounter sets out to rethink the notion of the archive in its different facets, reflecting on the forms in which history is presented as a disputed territory in building the present.

Theories on the crisis of capitalism have swamped social, political and economic analyses in recent years, with all interpretations, although hugely relevant, generally lacking a proposal for the future. Paul Mason, however, has formulated a theory about the transition to an alternative and impending system — a guide to postcapitalism.

As part of the series of performing arts designed in tandem with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2009). The piece materialised from the interest of Ecuadorian dancer and choreographer Fabián Barba in the work of Mary Wigman (1886–1973).

Laurie Anderson will conduct a performance in the Museo Reina Sofía to tie in with the publication of her latest book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood (Rizzoli, 2018), a survey of a career spanning more than forty years.

Putting ourselves in the present and placing this present inside the politics of temporality (taking up the idea of Mario Rufer) cannot be conceived outside the coloniality of power theory, formulated by Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018).

Alyce Mahon, curator of the exhibition Dorothea Tanning. Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2018 – 7 January 2019), will conduct a pre-opening guided tour of this retrospective, which explores the seventy-year-long career of the American artist. 

James Lingwood, curator of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. The Map and the Territory (Museo Reina Sofía 26 September 2018 – 7 January 2019), will lead a guided visit to the exhibit just before the opening with the aim of introducing the main ideas supporting Ghirri’s artistic practice. Ghirri is a key author for understanding postmodern photography and some of its fundamental theses, such as the blurring of reality with fiction and the extreme codification of representation in today’s world. 

This encounter, organised under the framework of the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, reflects on the connections between artistic practices, extreme violence and the precariousness of life.

This encounter, held in relation to the exhibition An Approach to Afal. The Autric-Tamayo Donation, recollects the central space occupied by the Afal collective in post-war Spanish photography. A conversation between two of its leading figures, photographers Ramón Masats and Carlos Pérez Siquier, and the show’s curator, Laura Terré, will be followed by the screening of Alberto Gómez Uriol’s documentary Afal, una mirada libre (Afal, a Free Gaze), which assembles declarations from the majority of its members.

In Loie Fuller: Research, choreographer Ola Maciejewska critically appropriates the “dancer’s dress” invented by Loie Fuller (Illinois, 1862–Paris, 1928), one of the most innovative and widely recognised dance artists in modernism.

The coda to the activities conducted by Franco Berardi Bifo in the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present will feature a screening of the film Comunismo futuro (Future Communism), scripted and narrated by the Italian writer and directed by Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg. Moreover, both will present the film and subsequently discuss it with the audience.

In conjunction with the opening of Marc Pataut. First Attempts, the galleries of the exhibition will play host to a conversation between the artist and Jorge Ribalta, the show’s curator, on photography as an instrument for capturing life at its most vulnerable and precarious, and as a  public service and a form of institutional critique. Other issues addressed will include the ethics of representation of the disadvantaged subject and, ultimately, the reasons why photography remains pivotal as an artistic practice of the real. 

In conjunction with the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, Diego García-Moreno’s documentary Beatriz González. ¿Por qué llora si ya reí? (Why Are You Crying If I’d Already Laughed?) will be screened on 22 March, followed by a conversation with the artist, curator and teacher.

In conjunction with the actions to be organised worldwide by the feminist movement on 8 March 2018, the Museo Reina Sofía will initiate a round-table discussion, setting out to offer a space of reflection and coordination between different stances and voices that are currently active in Madrid.

The programme Documents explores the book as an artistic medium, the possibilities and narratives of the archive, independent publishing and dissemination, and other strands of research in relation to the work of the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre. This fifth session is devoted to a conversation with the artist Francesc Abad and the recent publication of the book Napa(s). Persistir en lo inacabado [Napa(s). Persist with the Unfinished] (Ediciones La Bahía, 2017).

Within the framework of the exhibition Esther Ferrer. All Variations Are Valid, Including this One, the Museo Reina Sofía presents Actions, a series of interventions arranged with scores in the form of a user manual and directed by Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) in person.

Within the framework of the exhibition George Herriman. Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat, the Museum organizes a conference with the author of comics Art Spiegelman. The creator of Maus (1986) will explore his vision of the comic understood as a battle zone in postliterary times, in which art and commerce, high culture and popular, adult and child, reality and fantasy and, above all, the words and images collide with each other with special intensity.

In conjunction with the historical re-enactment of the performance We Forge The Future, by the industrial rock band Laibach — a member of the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) — in the Museo Reina Sofía, one of the band’s members, Ivan Novak, will lead a guided tour of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia.

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On the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough (November 1, 2017 - March 19, 2018), the artist gives a performative lecture that analyzes his relationship with the drawing and the creative process.

In conjunction with Palimpsest, the installation Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958) will display in the Palacio de Cristal from 6 October, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter between the artist and the historian Estrella de Diego, where both will examine how art confronts the way in which violence perforates each gesture, object and situation in contemporary society.

This conversation takes place inside the public programme Dialogues, formulated by the museum confederation L’Internationale, and departs from four core areas, inviting different thinkers, artists and activists to address terms which resonate in the present. The activity sees political theorist Chantal Mouffe and the philosopher Didier Eribon debate the term populism in relation to citizen representation and cultural institutions.

This activity introduces the thinking of the Brazilian intellectual inside the space of the retrospective dedicated to his work. The talk seeks to disseminate his main ideas in connection with the artists and works that accompany his reflections. Mário Pedrosa (Pernambuco, 1900 – Rio de Janeiro, 1981) was a tireless critic and historian and the author of a unique concept of modernity, whereby art, as he put it, is the “experimental exercise of freedom”.

Inside the framework of International Women’s Day, a conversation is set up between anthropologist Rita Laura Segato and sociologist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar as they seek to pinpoint the inequalities that still exist today under a range of focal points: from gender violence and domestic slavery to the coloniality of power used strategically as an objective of war by some states.

On the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to the artist Bruce Conner, Bruce Conner. It’s All True, at the Museo Reina Sofía (from February 22 to May 22, 2017), an encounter is presented between specialists Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels that seeks to analyze the influence of the creator in current artistic practices. Over the last decade, a number of artists have turned their attention to artistic figures from the last century who explored the production of hybrid forms, challenging artistic genres. In this sense, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is one of the most representative cases.

Founded in Egypt with the publication of their manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, the Art et Liberté Group (1938 – 1948), proposed a new understanding of Surrealism. This presentation also studies their visual and literary contributions beyond the polemics of post-colonial discourse, advocating for a new art-historical understanding of the Surrealist movement.

Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with Boris Charmatz, the French choreographer and incumbent director of Musée de la danse, in conjunction with the presentation of his piece 20 Dancers for the XX Century. Engaging in dialogue with João Fernandes, deputy director of Museo Reina Sofía, Charmatz will analyse the relationship between dance and contemporary art, along with the idea of the museum as a living institution which includes dance creation.

The second activity in the programme Documentos, which revolves around themes related to the Museo Reina Sofía Documentation Centre, is Zines of the Zone: a “nomadic library” bringing together some 1,500 fanzines, photobooks and self-edited photo-zines which all share the use of photography.

In conjunction with his exhibition The Rocket and the Abyss (5 May to 2 October, 2016), held in the Palacio de Cristal, Damián Ortega will engage in conversation with Peio Aguirre to discuss his publishing work.

The Museo Reina Sofía once again takes part in the activities that mark International Dance Day, organising two sessions that aim to grant visibility to and assimilate inside its spaces an artistic practice that is becoming increasingly prominent in the Museo’s programming, lines of research and Collection.