Multimedia

Conversation with the artist Maja Bajevic (Sarajevo, 1967) about her exhibition at Palacio de Cristal, in Madrid's Parque del Retiro. In this project, the artist analyses the consequences of historical and political conflicts and the impact they have on society.

Lynne Cooke, curator of the exhibition, presents the work of this singular, self-taught artist who was born completely deaf in Idaho. The exhibition offers a panoramic vision of the work of James Castle, an artist who invented his own way of showing and telling. Because of his deafness, he never learned to speak but he developed an imaginary all his own, nowadays described in terms such as primitive, marginal or visionary, in an attempt to unravel the complexity of his production.

Teresa Velázquez, curator of the exhibition, presents the work of the Brazilian Lygia Pape, an artist closely linked to the Neo-Concrete movement, which appeared as part of the strong current of renovation and modernism that swept Brazil in the 1950s. This exhibition shows the multidisciplinary nature of the artist's work, in terms of both themes and formats, which range from film to performance art and from painting to books, among others.

In this retrospective, Frances Morris, head of international collections at Tate Modern and curator of the exhibition, presents the work of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, an essential figure in contemporary, post-war art. The exhibition allows visitors to get to know her multiple facets, from her contacts with Pop art, to her art installations and interventions in public spaces.

What is the role of video in relation to the art institution? What paths and currents has video followed between its arrival and the current situation in Spain? This video comments on the program Video era. Setting and potential (80-00), held at the end of May 2011, which seeks to answer such questions, with a combined format of debate and screenings on four different dates.

Jon Bird, curator of the Leon Golub exhibition, explores the contemporary relevance of the artist's painting from various perspectives. First of all, how it brings historical painting up to date; secondly, how it conceives of the body; and thirdly, what the role of the viewer is.

In this interview Jorge Ribalta, the curator of the exhibition A hard, merciless light. The worker-photography movement, 1926-1939, proposes a journey through the documentary practices of the worker movements of the interwar period, emphasizing the appearance of a new notion of photographic modernism, one linked to social movements and the document

José Gutiérrez Solana painted La tertulia del café de Pombo in 1920, at the request of his friend Ramón Gómez de la Serna, a writer linked to the avant-garde movement in Spain. The painting captures a singular moment in Spanish intellectual life during the 1920s, between the dark connotations of España Negra and the renewal brought by the Generation of '98. A recent conservation analysis has revealed previously unknown details about the painting, leading to new interpretations.

Structured around various core ideas, this interview with the author of the book Modernismo después de la postmodernidad (2011) shows the dilemmas arising between a revision of the melancholic and contemplative past, returned in the form of the architectural memorial, and a critical reading from the museum, in which history and memory are confronted. Huyssen discusses the foundations of a new modernism, which has future prospects and projects but lacks a geographical centre and power hierarchies.

Roberto Jacoby is an artist who, through his multiple abandonments of art, nourishes the artistic practice of possibility, moments of tension and new agents. His work begins in the realm of Instituto Di Tella and, in a series of radical episodes, becomes Tucumán Arde (1968). Far from ending there, his subsequent career has dealt with networks, memory and its activations (or obliterations) in the archive.

Económicos, the exhibition by the artist Efrén Álvarez (Barcelona, 1980), outlines a global vision of today's economy as a discipline that caricaturizes itself. Forty drawings and texts by different authors show relationship systems in which the apparent pedagogical intention of the exhibition entails, in practice, looking at what is unproductive, decayed and alienated through work and consumption

The novelist Ricardo Piglia talks about the work of the Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby, in connection with the exhibition Roberto Jacoby, Desire rises from Collapse (Museo Reina Sofía, 25 February to 30 May, 2011). Jacoby's work, explains Piglia, contributes to the formation of two of today's key ideas: the creation of networks, through what Jacoby calls technologies of friendship, and the notion of immateriality as a fundamental aspect of contemporary society.

In much of the work by Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, 1973) history ceases to be a practice linked to the past and instead reveals the cracks through which it becomes an activity intimately connected to the present. In this interview he comments on some of his work, hermetic and complex, where the resource of narration becomes something that updates both history and its visual forms. The ideas of monument, public sculpture and photomontage are modern archetypes that Mendizabal uses as a possibility of that which is collective.

Re-opening the Palacio de Velázquez after more than five years, the Museo Reina Sofía's new exhibition venue presents the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Antoni Miralda (Barcelona, 1942). Over more than four decades of production, the Catalan artist's work has been characterized by a continuous and ironic demystification of the art object, joined by an anthropological analysis of the systems of consumption and ritual and ethnological presentation of the codes that articulate contemporaneity.

Presentation last 18 February 2010 of The Tattooed Skeleton, title of the performance with which the U.S.-born artist Suzanne Lacy takes on, in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofía, the topic of domestic violence against women, on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, 24th and 25th November 2010. Also involved in the presentation are María José Martín Bernabé, from the Government Delegation against Gender-based Violence; Ana María Pérez del Campo, from the Federation of Separated and Divorced Women; Covadonga Naredo and Esther Cerro, from the Federation of Progressive Women; and Sara Vicente, from the Commission for Research on the Abuse of Women.