Minimal Resistance

In this selection of works from its Collection, the Museo Reina Sofía takes a close look at art produced in Spain and abroad during the 1980s and 1990s. Minimal Resistance centres on the search by artists for new spaces of resistance in a globalised world, and examines a series of dualities that polarized the period dealt with, from the global economic crisis to financial capitalism, from the potential of the collective to the recuperation of the myth of the artist, from interventions reclaiming public spaces to discourses revolving around memory and the body, from a form of theatricality that emphasizes staging and architecture, to performative languages and relational models, and from the rehabilitation of traditional genres to the appropriation of images from mass media and mass culture. These tensions, which were very much a sign of the times, translate into a multiplicity of overlapping practices and discourses, and into a renewal of the art codes and languages that come from the perception of modernity as something past.

This exhibition encourages dialogue between pieces that, for the most part, have not been shown in the Museum, as they are recent acquisitions and deposits. Taking the inevitably fragmentary nature of the starting point of all contemporary art collections as a given, this is only the first view of a series of new presentations of the Collection planned for the future.

Organised by Museo Reina Sofía within the framework of “The Uses of Art,” a project by the European museum network L’Internationale. L’Internationale proposes a space for art within a non-hierarchical and decentralised internationalism, based on the value of difference and horizontal exchange among a constellation of cultural agents, locally rooted and globally connected. Comprising six major European museums, Moderna galerija (MG, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium); SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands) and associate organisations from the academic and artistic fields.

Exhibition rooms:

301.01 School is a Factory
301.02 Numax presenta. Joaquín Jordá
301.03 Genres of painting
301.04 Pictures (Imágenes)
301.05 Minimal Resistance. Fischli & Weiss
302.01 Video attitude
302.02 PM Magazine. Dara Birbaum
302.03 De toutes les coleurs (In All Colours)
302.04 Getting real. Collective practices and activisms
302.05 Les Goddesses. Moyra Davey
303 Gender in dispute
304.01 Manifestos. I speak from my difference
304.02 Facing the end of history
306 Modernity as the past
307 Institution and critique
308 On architecture and fictions

Exhibition Map

In collaboration with: