Exhibition. Miriam Cahn. everything is equally important

Miriam Cahn, schlafen, Installation, variable dimensions. Detail: oil on canvas No. 1 of 13. Gallery Meyer Riegger Karlsruhe and Gallery Jocelyn Wolff. Photo: Francois Doury © Miriam Cahn

For Miriam Cahn (Basel, Switzerland, 1949), drawing, painting, photography, sculpture and writing reach their fullest sense when she puts her own body in motion, making it work as a performance tool: therefore, it is not simply represented, but materially embodies the coordinates of age and physical condition, testing them through art, both on a daily basis and across the broad time of biography. The centrality of the body is related to Cahn’s feminist awakening in the gestation of her work in the 1970s, when she displaced the customary sway held by sight and the faculty of reason.

Conceived as a “biographic way of seeing the world”, this exhibition stretches from her first notebooks and charcoal drawings from the 1970s to her latest works, in which each gesture, each movement and each thought is “equally important”. Therefore, her works survey key themes which have become the focus of her concerns throughout her artistic career: war and violence, sexuality, nature, family and death. 

Date: From 5 June to 14 October, 2019
Location: Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofia
With the support of: Embassy of Switzerland
Curatorship Ana Ara and Fernando López

Screening. Interval 25. Samuel Alarcón. Oscuro y lucientes

Samuel Alarcón. Oscuro y lucientes [Dark and Lucientes]. Film, 2018

This new session inside Intervals, a programme which screens recent film work, presents Oscuro y lucientes (Dark and Lucientes), the fourth feature by Samuel Alarcón (Madrid, 1980). The film is one of the most fascinating and original works on Francisco de Goya, articulating, through the transformation of the painter’s exhumed body, a reflection on how a society of amnesia mistreats the most illustrious among its dead.

Samuel Alarcón’s film offers an unpredictable journey through the history of Goya’s repute and Spanish identity, at a time in which the figure of the artist and the image of a modern nation were created. Oscuro y lucientes thus employs the tools of a documentary essay as it eschews fiction and historicism, speaking at once of Goya and the present, all of which combines to form one of the most original films on the artist and his posthumous life.

Date: Thursday, 6 and Saturday, 8 June 2019
Hour: 7pm
Location: Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
Programme: Intervals
Admission: Free, until full capacity is reached

RRS. Anna Papaeti. The Undoing of Music

The Undoing of Music explores dark uses of music in cold-war Greece during the (post) civil-war period (1947–1957) and the military dictatorship (1967–1974), showing how regimes were in line with the latest repression methods practiced internationally. Through survivor testimonies and archival sources, it traces music’s central role in so-called brainwashing – in its evolution – from a combination of torture and propaganda practices to a fully-fledged scientific programme developed in the 1960s internationally.