Activities

Leandro Katz’ work (Buenos Aires, 1938) grapples with the passage of time and the construction of memory through the politics of perception made possible by audiovisual media. Two films, El día que me quieras (1997) and Exhumación (2007), explore the icon Che Guevara from the image of the leader’s lifeless body and later story of his death.

Somewhere between documentary and film essay, Double Take (2009) presents Alfred Hitchcock - and his doppelganger Ron Burrage - as a paranoid history professor unwillingly trapped between archive images of the Cold War and the broadcast of a live television programme.

The works of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, l975) focus on socio-political aspects and investigate the problematics of identity and memory using classical mythology, opera, Baroque dance, palace protocol and social behaviours.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is an artist based in New York whose work emphasises socio-political reality and delves into the nature of memory. He uses language and historical narrative, availing himself of theatrical and literary resources that he then transposes into conceptual language.

The films of the multifaceted Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach (Winterthur, 1965) start from a direct encounter with a place or person and take the depiction to the limits of the metaphor. His latest works, Verso (2008) - starring his father - and L’Atelier (2007), are being screened along with Spin (2001), an earlier film with the artist’s mother.

Cuando la tierra tiembla (2006) is a visual document of the human drama of exile, migration and displacement. The video draws on the circumstances of the Mexican community residing in New York to look at the situation of emigrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their testimonies, along with those of members of associations who work with ‘illegals,’ form the central thread that runs through the story.

In Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, a group of HIV-infected women created a network called Tapologo. Working with nurses from their community, they transformed misery and degradation into resistance and hope. Catholic bishop Kevin Dowling helped them, raising doubts about the sexual and moral doctrine of the Church in this context.

The camera never stops moving while it follows the operation of emptying the Huerta de San Vicente of all of its contents - paintings, furniture, rugs, flowerpots, knickknacks, a piano - leaving it clean and bare, and accompanying the objects wrapped in semi-transparent plastic to a storage site where they are placed in a pile.

Constanze Ruhm (Vienna, 1965) is an artist and filmmaker whose work looks at the relationship between film and the new media from the viewpoint of the ideas of feminist film theory, representation and identity. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents, for the first time in Spain, her film X Love Scenes (2007), the fifth in the X Characters series, which she began in 2001.

Since the 1970s, Marcel Odenbach (Cologne, 1953) has had a decisive influence on the development of video, using the qualities and possibilities offered by the medium to make political and social statements. “From the very start of my career as a video artist, I took the recording of moving pictures for granted,” says Odenbach.

Presented by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj iek (Ljubljana, 1949) and directed by Sophie Fiennes (Suffolk, 1967), The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) follows the philosopher as he examines films like The Exorcist (1973), Duck Soup (1933) and Alien (1979), speaking from replica sets of classic films like Psycho (1960), Blue Velvet (1986) and The Matrix (1999).

Viaje de novios (2006) is a project that developed over the course of almost three years. It includes four videos (Viaje de novios, Pago de salud, Circular de agua and Baile al fin) which together form one long piece. This long version of Viaje de novios looks at some of the key spaces in art and cinema: the portrait suspended in time; the landscape as aspiration, between memory and desire; the artistic gaze and its film correlation in the shot/reverse angle shot; using a couple as an editing principle; telling a story that tempers the real events and the narrative voice. “The experience of travelling, time passing, events that surprise us, the restlessness that finds its place in art, all find closure in the artwork, which is simultaneously formalised as just one more displacement” Javier Codesal (Sabiñánigo, 1958).

Surveillant Architectures is a platform from which to view and critique watchfulness in everyday life. It sprang from the idea of creating a new language and protocols to bring to light the theoretical, social, individual and political implications of surveillance, security and terror management issues today.

At the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Irit Batsry (Ramat Gan, 1957)

Klimt (2006) looks at the life and work of the Viennese painter and his relationship with women, his rejection of the artistic and moral conventions of the era and the ideals that guided his life. “The film is not a linear biography of Gustav Klimt’s life and times,” according to Raoul Ruiz (Puerto Montt, 1941- Paris, 2011). “It is a fantasy or better a phantasmagoria. Just like one of his paintings, where the material or imaginary figures mix and rotate around a central fulcrum: the painter Klimt. I wanted to outline the unique stylistic features of Klimt’s art, the prevailance of beauty, the excess of colour, the distorted spaces and the complex parts to catch life and clarify one of the richest, most conflicting and mysterious times of modern history.”