Film and Video

This international conference examines the media, narratives and practices which have sought to make contemporary visual arts accessible to wide audiences from 1950 to the present.

This seminar of public lectures, film screenings and research workshops explores how contemporary capitalism, in its galloping escalation and capacity to assimilate and produce aspects of private life, works through contradiction as a mechanism of regulation and adaptation.

Theories on the crisis of capitalism have swamped social, political and economic analyses in recent years, with all interpretations, although hugely relevant, generally lacking a proposal for the future. Paul Mason, however, has formulated a theory about the transition to an alternative and impending system — a guide to postcapitalism.

Choreographer and performer Cuqui Jerez (Madrid, 1973) forms part of the line-up for the 36^th Autumn Festival courtesy of a stage laboratory she has been developing since June of this year with the support of the Community of Madrid and the Museo Reina Sofía. The project will come to a close in November with the mise en scène of The Ultrathings in the Protocol Room of the Sabatini Building

As part of the series of performing arts designed in tandem with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents A Mary Wigman Dance Evening (2009). The piece materialised from the interest of Ecuadorian dancer and choreographer Fabián Barba in the work of Mary Wigman (1886–1973).

Laurie Anderson will conduct a performance in the Museo Reina Sofía to tie in with the publication of her latest book, All the Things I Lost in the Flood (Rizzoli, 2018), a survey of a career spanning more than forty years.

The programme Documents reflects on different thematic spheres in the Museo’s Library and Documentation Centre: artist publications, platforms, publishing networks, independent publications, and archive as a place that articulates and reinvents narratives about art and its ecosystem. In this, the sixth activity in the series, Mela Dávila, a contributor with documenta, Kassel, and an expert on its holdings, addresses power relations and affective affinities that reveal the institution’s epistolary archive.

Gamelan is a traditional ensemble of percussion instruments from the Indonesian islands of Java and Bali. The fascination that has stemmed from its percussive and tonality-rich sound over the past 130 years means it is regarded as one of the major influences on repetitive music and, in turn, a large part of twentieth-century music.

Arbusto Ardiente (Burning Bush) was conceived after Amaia Urra’s artist residency in the landscape garden of Parc Jean-Jacques-Rousseau, Ermenonville, Oise, Paris, where the philosopher lived in the final weeks of his life.

Since 2010, the academic year of the Study Centre is inaugurated and closed with a lecture. Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán, Benjamin Buchloh, and Nelly Richard have each explored in their lectures different methodological approaches and tensions affecting art history in recent years. Lucy Lippard will be presenting the seventh lecture within the lecture series of Museo Reina Sofía, which on this occasion will be complemented by a workshop led by Lippard herself.

Putting ourselves in the present and placing this present inside the politics of temporality (taking up the idea of Mario Rufer) cannot be conceived outside the coloniality of power theory, formulated by Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018).

Taking this question as his point of departure, Takao Kawaguchi (1962) began, in 2013, to explore the possibilities of copying the movements of the acclaimed choreographer Kazuo Ohno (1906–2010) as a way to access the intrinsic and seemingly non-transferable qualities of this figure, central not only in Japanese post-war dance but also the universal history of the discipline in the twentieth century.

In the first comprehensive retrospective on one of today’s pivotal directors, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española will screen the entirety of Wang Bing’s films and film installations, scarcely exhibited or shown due to their extreme running times. Moreover, the series features the film-maker’s first lecture in Spain, along with two premieres on Spanish soil and another international premiere.

Alyce Mahon, curator of the exhibition Dorothea Tanning. Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2018 – 7 January 2019), will conduct a pre-opening guided tour of this retrospective, which explores the seventy-year-long career of the American artist. 

James Lingwood, curator of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. The Map and the Territory (Museo Reina Sofía 26 September 2018 – 7 January 2019), will lead a guided visit to the exhibit just before the opening with the aim of introducing the main ideas supporting Ghirri’s artistic practice. Ghirri is a key author for understanding postmodern photography and some of its fundamental theses, such as the blurring of reality with fiction and the extreme codification of representation in today’s world. 

In its second edition, Archipelago asserts its approach to listening as a form of both knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. Attendants are encouraged to approach the complexities of the cotemporary world not only through the ear, but also through the body, by absorbing sound with all their organs and bones.

This summer’s film season explores the idea of neighbourhood cinema as an open, local space, in which images prompt a dialogue on the history, local residents, aspirations and desires inhabiting Madrid’s Lavapiés barrio.

This third session in the series Six Contradictions and the End of the Present is centred on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, activist and African American theorist, and Yayo Herrero, anthropologist, technical engineer, social educator and ecofeminist. These sessions will reflect on racial difference and care as a point of departure for contemplating a more just and equal society, putting forward a life which is possible outside ideas of production and economic value.

Queerama reconstructs the history of LGBTIQ+ movements and their representation in film and popular culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, doing so through the vast British Film Institute (BFI) archive. The film extends across a century of experiences of sexual diversity, encompassing public persecution and prosecution, criminalisation and medicalisation, and also sexual liberation, pride and equality struggles.

This program emerges out of the need to bring together ideas on the illnesses we suffer from, at a time when the welfare state has given way to a type of governance centered on the proliferation of new disorders, diseases, and medications.

Since 2000, certain universities, chiefly in the English-speaking world, have developed multidisciplinary studies, which include visual studies and others with the generic title Sound Studies. Initially, the specialised historiography in this field analysed the presence of sound and music in the arts, before focusing on vibrational force, broadening its field of analysis to literature, painting and, naturally, music.

This encounter, organised under the framework of the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, reflects on the connections between artistic practices, extreme violence and the precariousness of life.

This encounter, held in relation to the exhibition An Approach to Afal. The Autric-Tamayo Donation, recollects the central space occupied by the Afal collective in post-war Spanish photography. A conversation between two of its leading figures, photographers Ramón Masats and Carlos Pérez Siquier, and the show’s curator, Laura Terré, will be followed by the screening of Alberto Gómez Uriol’s documentary Afal, una mirada libre (Afal, a Free Gaze), which assembles declarations from the majority of its members.

This series of lectures reflects on the new forms of materiality underlying contemporaneity. The art of recent decades has been shaped by its taking the processes of dematerialisation described by Lucy Lippard in the late 1960s to the extreme; namely, the now off-centre position of the object, the development of project-based practices, the changes to the status of art work and the displacement of the concept of authorship.

As part of the A possible strength: towards a poietics of living together activities program, this reading group and collective reflection emerge with the goal of revisiting a past that reverberates in the present.

This conference is part of a collaboration set up between the Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (the Open University of Catalonia) for the completion of a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. Oriented towards critical and reflective studies, it sets out from a contemporary and expansive notion of Fine Arts which questions the traditional limits of artistic practice.

In this course, writer Servando Rocha will survey the deviations and disbandment of Dada, in addition to its repeated resurrection in popular culture, sound experiments and a wave of on-the-edge situations running from the Surrealists to the Lettrists, from Fluxus to Situationists, from punk to guerrilla communication, ending up at noise and experimental music.      

This lecture leads into an annual series which explores the relationship between tourism imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. Once a year, an innovative case study will be presented which reflects on how mass tourism, as an industry of experience, has been linked to the search for experience characterising art since 1960.

In its aim to attract new audiences to classical and contemporary music, Spain's National Orchestra and Choir (OCNE) arranges this programme of Mini Concerts, in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía and framed within OCNE’s special events scheduled for 2018.

This session spotlights film-maker João Moreira Salles (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) and his recent film No intenso agora (In the Intense Now, 2017), which revives the international jolt of May’ 68 through the reassembly of now-familiar film archives. Moreira Salles, regarded as one of the foremost exponents of contemporary documentary-making, will present the film via video conference.

In Loie Fuller: Research, choreographer Ola Maciejewska critically appropriates the “dancer’s dress” invented by Loie Fuller (Illinois, 1862–Paris, 1928), one of the most innovative and widely recognised dance artists in modernism.

The coda to the activities conducted by Franco Berardi Bifo in the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present will feature a screening of the film Comunismo futuro (Future Communism), scripted and narrated by the Italian writer and directed by Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg. Moreover, both will present the film and subsequently discuss it with the audience.

The Museo Reina Sofía brings International Dance Day forward to Saturday 28 April with a double programme showcasing the work of choreographers Sofía Asencio (Societat Doctor Alonso) and María Muñoz (Mal Pelo), accompanied by Tirso Orive and Federica Porello, respectively.

The Museo Reina Sofía brings International Dance Day forward to Saturday 28 April with a double programme showcasing the work of choreographers Sofía Asencio (Societat Doctor Alonso) and María Muñoz (Mal Pelo), accompanied by Tirso Orive and Federica Porello, respectively.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist.

For this session of the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017). In the lecture, the philosopher explores new forms of power and domination; the workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author and, as a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro.

In conjunction with the opening of Marc Pataut. First Attempts, the galleries of the exhibition will play host to a conversation between the artist and Jorge Ribalta, the show’s curator, on photography as an instrument for capturing life at its most vulnerable and precarious, and as a  public service and a form of institutional critique. Other issues addressed will include the ethics of representation of the disadvantaged subject and, ultimately, the reasons why photography remains pivotal as an artistic practice of the real. 

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and the invention of the modern subject in a body of writing intersected by melancholy and the conception of multiple fictitious identities form the backbone of this series, a survey on the author of The Book of Disquiet from the perspective of film. The programme touches upon themes such as the relationship between writing and life, performance and narrative, and non-literary forms of text, featuring films by four Portuguese directors, Manoel de Oliveira, João Botelho, Paulo Rocha, and João César Monteiro, and one Brazilian, Júlio Bressane, whose work constitutes, historically speaking, a playful, popular and counter-cultural opposition to Cinema Novo.