Film and Video

The art critic and independent curator Santiago Olmo has a conversation with the artist Soledad Sevilla about the exhibition Written in the celestial bodies, a site-specific installation at Palacio de Cristal in Madrid's Parque del Retiro.

Spoken Exhibition is an alternative history of Polish art since 1960, a history that tells about the creation of art institutions, the major exhibitions and the art gestures that have determined the specificity of a post-communist era. It is presented as a cross between performance art and narrative that is reinterpreted and reread in every new context in which it takes place.

Comprised of a guided visit to the exhibition Fragments of memory, with commentary by the artist, followed by a colloquium with the audience, this workshop seeks to articulate both languages, that of the visible and that of the verbal, that of the artist and that of the audience or that of the exhibition and that of debate, as keys to understanding Elena Asins' work.

The exhibition Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel, is about the legacy of Raymond Roussel, one of the lateral histories of modern art. In this conversation, the exhibition's curators discuss the keys to understanding the poetic universe of Raymond Roussel and his significance in artistic modernism.

In a lecture entitled René Daniëls revisited, the art critic Dominic van den Boogerd discusses some of the recurring themes found in Daniëls' oeuvre: his fascination for the picture as a "fleece" and for painting as a play of appearances and disappearances.

The book Rethinking Dramaturgy. Errancy and Transformation is the product of the First International Seminar on New Dramaturgies (Centro Párraga, 2009). Its presentation in the Museo marks the beginning of the academic year in the Master’s in Performing Arts Practices and Visual Culture in the Study Centre.

At the end of 1950, Jorge Oteiza concluded his investigations in the field of sculpture but, far from fading away, his aesthetic interests continued in a different sphere, one previously unexplored by him: film.

This conversation serves as an introduction to the largest retrospective to be held to date on the Italian artist. alighiero boetti. game plan is co-produced by Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York) and the Museo, and is curated by Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey and Christian Rattemeyer.

Brazilian cinema back then was not just film, it was something more: cinema of invention, Quasi-cinema, experimental cinema, barbaric cinema, bad taste cinema, Boca do Lixo, Cinema Marginal, udigrudi, pornochanchada. These are the expressions used by both critics and by the artists and filmmakers themselves to describe an important part of the film production of those years.

Acoustic Space is a music series featuring national and international artists that show the various facets of contemporary musical creation. Through this series, Museo Reina Sofía, in collaboration with Mahou and its program Afterwork by Mahou Premium Light, enables audiences to get to know new conceptions of jazz, electronic music derivations and the radical eclecticism that characterises today's music, as well as the points of contact between the classical music tradition and the popular tradition, the boundaries of which are becoming less and less defined.

Screening of Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary James Castle: Portrait of an Artist. The film is introduced by Ann Percy, curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and also curator of the exhibition James Castle: A Retrospective, and Lynne Cooke, assistant director at the Museo and curator of the exhibition James Castle: Show and Store.

In the midst of many changes in the area of audiovisual screening, as commercial circuits undergo a constant narrowing process, Museo Reina Sofía and ICAA (Madrid's Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts) reformulate the former as a new space for film.

Once again the Conference on Computer and Electronic Music offers a series of workshops on sound production and post-production, concerts dedicated to the aural perception of space and to live improvisation and sound projection, as well as a series of reflections, in a conversation and round table, about the artistic possibilities of radio and a fresh look at the Museum Collection from a new perspective, the auditory sphere.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that reflect the various facets of contemporary musical creation.

Migraciones escénicas is the second stage of a project on research in the performing arts, organised by Artea in collaboration with international groups in Germany, Brazil, Chile, Slovenia and Turkey.

The aspiration of this audiovisual series is to make meanings explode upon collision; it is an arranged disagreement between the sections and works that constitute the general program.

In this performance piece, Maja Bajevic uses gestures and situations to look at how ideology operates. The performance goes on for four hours a day, for two five-day periods. The tools used are also left on view to the public during the exhibition.

To mark the occasion of the exhibition Lygia Pape. Espacio imantado, there will be a performance of the artist's piece Divisor, in which audience participation plays a vital role. With Divisor, Pape wanted to create a collective work that could be repeated even when she was not present.

Los Rencontres Internationales París/Berlín/Madrid ofrecen un espacio de encuentro entre diferentes ciudades europeas, artistas y crítica, mostrando tanto ciclos como las últimas realizaciones audiovisuales de carácter experimental.

There is no possible separation between art and life with Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1928). She was an active member in the critical art scene during the Vietnam War in the 1960s in New York, where she was also connected to minimalism, happenings and pop art. In 1973, she returned to Japan, extending the boundaries of her work. Her heterogeneous production ranges from collage to musical compositions, design, novels and installation art. Kusama obsessively develops the idea of repetition and screentone, covering surfaces with polka dots, creating what she calls ‘infinity nets’, one of her trademarks.

This programme is presented in conjunction with the exhibition A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939 (Museo Reina Sofía, 6 April to 22 August 2011), which analyses the history of amateur proletarian, documentary photography.

Encounters is a programme with which the Museo looks to generate debate on its scheduled exhibitions. Temporarily coinciding with the public opening of the exhibitions, a dialogue is initiated between artists, curators, critics and historians in order to look ahead to and question the lines and set-up of each exhibition project.

This film highlights the invisibility of global labour even in the process of production. The sea, writes Allan Sekula, is forgotten until disaster strikes. The sea, formerly the object of romantic imagination, is examined from a new angle, that of the transport of merchandise in times of globalisation.

The artistic team PSJM, a duo formed by Cynthia Viera and Pablo San José based in Berlin, presents La Isla de Hidrógeno, a book in which a well-structured bunch of solid characters comes together in different organically related stories. The authors of the book will be joined by Miguel Cereceda, José Luis Corazón and Jesús Carrillo.

The Critical Practices Seminar aims to nurture students’ capacity for critical judgement and encourage the adoption of a standpoint through the profound knowledge of currents of contemporary thought. The seminar is structured around the reading and analysis of documents and materials submitted by each of the participating professors.

In celebration of International Dance Day, Dance Attacks is a series of dance actions held in different public spaces throughout Madrid. The performances, recorded and distributed through the social networks, create a set of brief choreographic actions and disruptions.

This gathering of writers and publishers is an opportunity to look at the forms of minor literature, from spaces such as Quebec, Montreal or Tangiers. Sonia García Soubriet, Jesús Egido and Madeleine Monette dialogue about landscapes of seduction and about literature as a universe of noise and silence, urban labyrinths and private refuges.

This seminar aims to show the variety and complexity in some of the debates on contemporary Spanish history. To this end, it compiles the latest research on aspects such as exhibitions, urbanism, magazines, photography and the relationship with totalitarian regimes and their outcome in the Spanish Civil War and Second World War.

Jorge Ribalta, curator of the exhibition The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939, exercises a first attempt in this presentation of the historical documentation of the worker photography movement. Beyond formulating an examination of artists and unique works, his aim is to recount the constitution of public spaces through the medium of photography.

The Festival Ellas Crean 2011 is now in its seventh year. This event provides a meeting point for dialogue and expression by women creators from a wide range of disciplines, such as film, music, the visual arts, science, poetry, literature, gastronomy, comics and dance.

In his book Expresionismo. El lenguaje y construcción de la forma arquitectónica, Javier Climent argues that there is another history behind functionalism, one that reflects the legacy of the Expressionist tradition in Modernism. The book shows the less uniform side of functionalism, in which expressionism and organicism blend with rationalism.

Although they span the area between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, the film and audiovisual activities of José Val del Omar have taken place in the territory of myth. Myth as something situated outside of history, that only leads to cult status.