Live Arts

To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gladys Palmera, the Museo Reina Sofía organises, in collaboration with the Gladys Palmera Foundation, a day which spins around African-influenced dances and rhythms, for instance danzón, chachachá, mambo, rumba, cumbia, salsa and ballenato, genres which have shaped Latin American cultural identity, from the Caribbean islands to the Southern Cone.

The performances of James Lee Byars (Detroit, Michigan, 1932 – Cairo, 1997) bring together the aesthetic and life concerns of this unique artist. In conjunction with the exhibition the Museo Reina Sofía devotes to the artist, under the title James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question, and inside the framework of the programme Living Matter. Other Approaches to Material, this day re-stages, over two sessions, a selection of James Lee Byars’s performances, which open a dialogue with his visual work inside the space of the show. In the form of a coda, the activity also includes the presentation of a new performance conceived specifically for the occasion, Acaeció en Granada, which explores Byars’s relationship with the artist Miguel Benlloch (Loja, Granada, 1954 – Seville, 2018) in the city of Granada.

This public programme explores, via lectures, drifts, encounters and performances throughout the month of June, one of the main strands in the Museo Reina Sofía’s temporary exhibition season: the return of materiality. The exhibitions Antoni Tàpies. The Practice of Art, James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question and Eva Lootz. Making as if Wondering: So What Is This? all share references to the affective, speculative and spiritual capacity of matter.

Anastasio de Gracia Foundation and the Museo Reina Sofía pay homage to the Hungarian-American photojournalist on the seventieth anniversary of his death via the concert Slightly Out of Focus, a work inspired by a same-titled autobiographical book (Henry Holt and Company, 1947) and performed by Italian musician Fabio Turchetti and Hungarian pianist Grego Foldvari. In accompaniment with the sound composition is a video-graphic piece by Raquel Sardá and Vicente Alemany.

On Friday, 17 May the Museo Reina Sofía celebrates International Museum Day courtesy of a vibrant music programme curated by Radio 3. Throughout the day, the Nouvel Courtyard will once again become the stage for a live schedule of music conducted by Radio 3 — also livestreamed on the Radio 3 website – including a total of fifty live performances from 7am to 10pm, while from 9pm to midnight the Sabatini Building Garden will be immersed in electronic music played by Radio 3 DJs.

This performance series by De Soto, in close proximity to that which is termed durational art, takes root in a genealogy of works which, from the 1970s, have challenged the audience to delve deeper into the art of waiting, inviting them to look closer and listen more attentively.

Durante los años 2022 y 2023, en colaboración con el equipo de Museo en Red (hoy renombrado Museo Tentacular), La Laboratoria participó en el Nodo crítico Investigaciones Militantes de Tejidos conjuntivos, el Programa de Estudios Propios del Museo Reina Sofía. Simultáneamente impulsó y acompañó una serie de estancias donde distintos colectivos, investigador+s y artist+s problematizaron cuestiones muy diversas enfocadas desde la investigación militante como una práctica política que genera conocimiento colectivo. En la tela de araña es un programa de dos jornadas, que incluyen varias conversaciones y una pieza escénica, a modo de culminación de este proceso de investigación y creación.

By way of discussions, screenings, visits to the Museo and stage pieces, the festival substantiates the visual arts, theatre, writing, the podcast and the fanzine as key tools to imagine and build inclusive cultural spaces for the realities racialised people face, and to steadfastly bring about communal enjoyment, reflection and laughter and promote co-existence and social participation.

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Caribbean tides and currents, which flow through the Sabatini Building’s Garden and Cloister from 10pm until midnight as part of the ARCOmadrid 2024 closing party. Embracing the themes of this edition of the Madrid art fair, The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, DJ Valerie Brathwaite and Toccororo will unfurl a sound-based connection between distant shores, and with influences and approaches that are as interesting as they are different.

The Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant.

This edition turns its attentions towards cavities, both mental and physical, that open in our bodies after the passing-through of other bodies. As porous beings we live in constant relations and exchange with others, not only because we are social, or because we inhabit the planet — filled with other living beings — but because we are the planet. And its history. As part of this planet-being, the proposals in this edition of ESTUDIO take on a poetic responsibility, with Ola Maciejewska, Josu Bilbao and Paz Rojo assaying material forms that are poetic, physical and anatomical, and which entail passing through knowledge knowing that results are not guaranteed.

Across the months of October and November 2023, the artistic investigation Not Yet, Still will be developed inside the Museo Reina Sofía. The project by artist and researcher Paz Rojo is articulated via two laboratories, an encounter, a stage experiment and a conversation.

This third edition is articulated around the artistic and discursive trajectory of Tim Etchells and his work with Forced Entertainment, a collective founded in Sheffield, England, in 1984 and made up of Robin Arthur, Richard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells as artistic director.

Chile or Utopian Imagination is a programme of activities which gathers film, textile and community art, critical thought and poetry to explore memory in relation to the project of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) Government, the coup d’état and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship in Chile by way of the work of different artists and thinkers.