Activities

Artist Andrea Büttner and Isabella Lenzi, an independent curator and research fellow in the Museo’s Collections Department, engage in conversation about Büttner’s work, which is part of Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life, the final chapter in the new re-hang of the Collection. This event is organised inside the framework of a series of activations of the Collection throughout the month of March, underscoring feminist artistic practices and the work of women artists.

In this encounter, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michelle Harewood present the key aspects of the exhibition From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett, curated by both, in a survey on graphic art’s potential during historical avant-garde movements. 

This edition of Situated Voices, convened from RAMA and in collaboration with Museo Situado, seeks to reflect through young migrant and anti-racist activists to collectively imagine multi-faceted, creative, political and disobedient processes allowing anti-racism to be incorporated into the heart of struggles and thereupon to examine this intersection with other issues around education, participation in the political community, heteromormativity, climate justice, etc.   

These sessions set out from the idea that a feminism with the will for transformation must prioritise the most oppressed and violated needs, giving precedence to those who sustain the reproduction of life with their work. A feminism that is truly transformative must place the material conditions of existence at the centre and be able to build syndicalism based on stable networks of mutual support, politicising individual problems and allowing struggles to connect, and at the same time intersecting racial, gender and class oppression.

Over the past six years, the Southern Conceptualisms Network and Museo Reina Sofía have joined forces to arrange this periodic encounter, which stems from the common sentiment of the need to urgently strike up a dialogue between spaces where memory gestates. This fourth edition, under the title Archives to Come, calls upon imaginative powers underlying archive practices and thought and the way in which they are capable of proposing alterations to the dominant temporalities limiting the construction of other chronologies, the seed of different futures.  

March 8 has become a symbol of protest that flows beyond this date to solidify synergies and feminist, historical and present struggles. For over a century now, this day has condensed and amplified a first basic premise: rights for all women always, every single day. From numerous corners, from the past and the present, we aspire to many more 8Ms — every single day. In this way, this program started in February will be extended until June. 

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a video programme created by contemporary Turkish artists, featuring works commissioned by the SALT Contemporary Art Centre — with sites in Istanbul and Ankara — to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the institution. Under the title Ardışık (The Sequential), the programme sketches the scene of the most salient recent art in Turkey and is set forth as a reflection of the major debates taking place in the country.

This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.

This new edition analyses the presence of architecture in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive, a repository of memory containing, in fragments, the history of the institution: its origins as a hospital of neoclassicism, its role during the Spanish Civil War as a field hospital, its transformation into an art centre and its expansion as an international museum. Various landmarks that enable a micro history of civil and public architecture to be traced from the 18th century to the present day, but without losing sight of the process of configuration and the idea of what a museum must be.

This lecture series, the third instalment organised by the interuniversity group TURICOM — which is part of the project Paradoxical Modernity: Artistic and Tourist Experience in Developmentalist Spain (1959–1975), PGC2018-093422-B-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE) — endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. . More specifically, this new edition centres on the concept of ruin as a centre of attraction for cultural habits and practices inside the sphere of tourism.

ESTUDIO III in Conversation is an encounter which is part of ESTUDIO III. Go Out to Encounter. Speak to Place, the third edition of a programme which brings together the investigations of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the third edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.

This round-table discussion on municipalist graphic art concludes the programme of this new edition, following an initial creative workshop conducted by Enrique Flores and held from 10 to 12 November 2021.

Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, Lugo, 1902 – Madrid, 1995) is considered a key artist in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This encounter presents the catalogue raisonnée of oil paintings from her artistic practice as a whole and brings together many of the foremost specialists to have worked on her output.

Intervals is a regular programme which premieres film work that lies beyond the Museo Reina Sofía’s mainstream circuit. This new edition centres on New Sevilles, a feature made by film-maker Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) and artist and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964) which was awarded the Prize for Best Film (Ex Aequo) in the New Waves – No Fiction section of the 18th Seville Film Festival and drifts around the Spanish city through history and to the contemporary beat of flamenco.

Filipino film-maker and artist Kidlat Tahimik (Baguio, 1942) presents his latest film Balikbayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment Redux IV, a new edit of a project spanning thirty years on the circumnavigation of the Earth and Western accounts of the “discovery” of the New World. The artist will also take part in an online encounter with Sara Nadal-Melsió, organised by Museo Reina Sofía and the King Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University (NYU-KJCC).

For the second year, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.

This encounter is inspired by the Chilean collective’s work and seeks to offer a space of dialogue with them and with feminist collectives from Madrid to reflect upon the impact of their action, the significance of its upsurge, and its power to bring about new common feminist meaning inside the reverberation of this global wail that follows the wake of the mass strikes and protests of the 8M movement and the struggles for abortion rights.

To mark the 16^th edition of Book Night, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre present a new poem by artist Eduardo Scala entitled INSTANTeTERNO (INSTANT and ETERNAL), written for this occasion.

This programme seeks to put forward dialogue between the Zapatista, European and Global South experiences of self-government. The encounter sets in motion questions around institutionality, care, economies, redistribution, and radical teaching as a form of insurgent imagination decolonised from Eurocentric notions of utopia, and with the capacity to break the hegemony of present and future capitalist visions.

By delving deeper into the domesticity of appliance, this activity also seeks to widen the margins of listening to different inhabitants and agents — human and non-human, vegetative, electro-domestic — that make up our domestic space, or what we call house or home. Different forms that make up the same place, different territories in which different temporalities cross over and from which perspectives that reach remote locations open.

This new edition, an encounter, centres on Skefkef, an independent comic/magazine for adults that was created in 2013 in Casablanca and examines the social and cultural sides of contemporary Morocco via drawings, illustrations and satirical texts, and comprises a conversation with Salah Malouli, a founding member of the publication, and a visual and thematic analysis of the magazine’s different editions.

This encounter sees feminist illustrator Zainab Fasiki (Fez, 1994), writer Abdellah Taïa (Salé, 1973) — both participants in and advocates of L’amour fait loi — and writer Najat El Hachmi (Nador, 1979), author of the novel On Monday We Will Be Loved, discuss the protests that have arisen in Morocco through the increasingly frequent actions in defence of sexual rights. They also look at the need for other accounts and imaginaries that reflect the complexity, diversity and richness of Morocco’s intimate territory and its diaspora, habitually accounted for and represented with the simplification and reductionism exuded by the colonial and exoticizing gaze.

New trans* feminism, anti-colonial and non-binary struggles, incorporated by different bodies and generations, have undoubtedly resignified the meaning of queer, just as positions reclaiming a new normal have been reformulated.

Harvest 2021, therefore, sets out a debate and reflection around publishing and producing photobooks, inviting people immersed in the layout phase of a project to share their photographic works with the other participants.

A group of feminist lawyers, journalists and producers formed the observer brigade Open the Gates! in May 2021, with the aim of documenting and granting visibility to the work and living situation of numerous female day labourers, both local and seasonal migrant workers.

The Museo Reina Sofía organises a visit to the exhibition Vivian Suter, led by the artist herself, which includes the screening of the film Vivian’s Garden (2017), directed by Rosalind Nashashibi.