Film and Video

This series of conferences and screenings analyse, from the 1970s onwards, the creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces, particularly in the Lower Manhattan area of New York. The debates delve deeper into photographic projects and performances, along with screenings of films and videos, to reveal a version of the city that greatly differs from the official one.

During the 1970s, a time of intensive de-industrialisation and the transition to an information economy in New York, artists found new ways to use the city. The creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces intensified, especially in Lower Manhattan, which was becoming a centre of the commercial art world. Action Behind the Margins combines debates, performances pieces and film screenings to reveal a city where public and private spheres intermingle and marginal subjects assert their right to the city.

Abigail Child (San Francisco, 1948) explores the possibilities inherent in mixing genres and narrative strategies to engage public space through memory and history.

Since the 1950s, Spain has been home to an important tradition of experimental film cut off from conventional exhibition spaces. This series was designed to give this unknown branch of film the visibility it deserves. From more than a thousand films, forty-three were chosen to be screened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in six sessions. In order to spark a dialogue between the different eras, this vastly diverse group of seminal films was shown out of chronological order, blazing a trail through the almost unknown history of Spanish cinema.

Pedro Garhel (Tenerife, 1952-2005), a multifaceted and multidisciplinary artist, was a pioneer in the field of electronic and interactive art in Spain. He began his work in the area of performance and video art in Madrid, where in 1981 he founded the emblematic Espacio P, a multi-purpose centre managed by the artists themselves that became a meeting point between the sound, visual and performing arts.

The title Reacción en cadena applies to a selection of videos from the Cal Cego Contemporary Art Collection (Barcelona) that create genealogies of artists, works and discourses. Viewing the videos reveals the relationships, associations, counterpositions, superpositions, revisions and conflicts generated between them.

Since its first edition, Eurojazz orients its line up towards musicians within the sphere of continental Europe. The festival’s poster design looks to connect the jazz genre with European cultural identity. In this edition the Museo presents concerts by Rita Marcoully, Tingvall Trio, Terje Rypdal, Posé-Salvador-Roper Trío and Louis Sclavis Quintet.

Transitland: video art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009 is a project put together to mark the occasion of the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It includes a selection of one hundred works produced between 1989 and 2009 that reflect the political, social and personal transformations that occurred in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.

Shirin Neshat (Iran, 1957) is a visual artist based in the United States whose works explore the image of women in Islamic society. She first gained recognition on an international level after the publication of her portraits included in the series Women of Allah (1993-1997) and then became more widely known in 1999 when she received the International Prize at the Venice Biennale for her video installations Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999).

LAX (the code for the Los Angeles international airport) is a project conceived of and produced by the Museo Reina Sofía Audiovisual Department coinciding with ARCO10, which hosted Los Angeles as a guest city. The project is divided into three sections: L.A. Films, Video Art in Los Angeles (1970-1984) and, for the first time in Spain, a retrospective on the underground California filmmaker Kenneth Anger (Santa Monica, 1927).

Leandro Katz’ work (Buenos Aires, 1938) grapples with the passage of time and the construction of memory through the politics of perception made possible by audiovisual media. Two films, El día que me quieras (1997) and Exhumación (2007), explore the icon Che Guevara from the image of the leader’s lifeless body and later story of his death.

Film at the Pamplona Encounters is a series of screenings and debates organised on the occasion of Encuentros de Pamplona 72. Fin de fiesta del arte experimental (The Pamplona Encounters 1972. End of the Party for Experimental Art), held at the Museo Reina Sofía (28 October 2009 - 22 February 2010). According to Vicente J. Benet, the Encounters “offered an overview of audiovisual media characterised by a hybridisation that may seem somewhat baffling today. The array of options for the viewers ranged from the most heterodox trends in the new video media of the time to vestiges of the earliest films, slices of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, recent experimental films, examples of professional-quality films with ties to modern writing and independent films”.

The world is not perfect, although it can and must change to adjust to the needs of the moment and the people who inhabit it. This is the conceptual framework of Misura italiana, the video art series organised by the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci-Prato for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Singular Multitude: The Art of Resistance is an ambitious series that includes conferences, a performance piece and a selection of audiovisual works that reflect the desire of their creators to investigate the unlimited possibilities found on the edges of official taste and the socio-political circumstances of the present day, all while recalling events, revealing traumas, mediating memory and producing counterimages in contemporary society and art.

Hunger (2008) is the first feature-length film directed by the British artist Steve McQueen (London, 1969), one of the most influential directors in the United Kingdom. The film depicts life in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland during the IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands in 1981. With an epic sense of detail, the film offers an opportune exploration of what happens when both mind and body are taken to the limit.

Somewhere between documentary and film essay, Double Take (2009) presents Alfred Hitchcock - and his doppelganger Ron Burrage - as a paranoid history professor unwillingly trapped between archive images of the Cold War and the broadcast of a live television programme.

The works of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, l975) focus on socio-political aspects and investigate the problematics of identity and memory using classical mythology, opera, Baroque dance, palace protocol and social behaviours.

In the words of Gilles Deleuze, everyone has his south - it doesn't matter where it is. In the imaginary cartography of the global order, the idea of south presents itself as a powerful metaphor that acts on two fronts.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is an artist based in New York whose work emphasises socio-political reality and delves into the nature of memory. He uses language and historical narrative, availing himself of theatrical and literary resources that he then transposes into conceptual language.

Visionaries - Audiovisual Works in Latin America is an eclectic exhibition that is full of vitality and deeply committed to audiovisual creation in Latin America. The series looks at Latin American experimental video and film from Mexico to the countries of the Southern Cone in a combination of screenings and conferences that put everything from pioneers in experimental film to more recent productions under the historical lens. Organised by Brazil’s Instituto Itaú Cultural, the series consists of 73 works grouped into nine programmes.

Fragments of the East. Performance Art and Feminist Discourse (1968-1989) is a video and conference series on the origin of feminist discourse in the artistic practice in three historical contexts with no public sphere. As artists beginning within the framework of the communist dictatorships of Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Poland, Geta Brătescu (Ploiesti, 1926), Sanja Iveković (Zagreb, 1929) and Ewa Partum (Grodzisk, 1945) created works that question artistic specificity and autonomy at the same time that they allude to repressive contexts and the subject’s capacity for transformation and representation in works of art.

The films of the multifaceted Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach (Winterthur, 1965) start from a direct encounter with a place or person and take the depiction to the limits of the metaphor. His latest works, Verso (2008) - starring his father - and L’Atelier (2007), are being screened along with Spin (2001), an earlier film with the artist’s mother.

Film has made its way into museums and galleries at the same time that art has opened up avenues in the world of film. Exhibition spaces often host multimedia installations, experimental film sessions and even narrative films. In their quest to integrate image, sound and movement, more and more artists are turning to cinema as a means of expression, exploring experimental abstraction, documentary and narrative fiction.

Lillian Ball, an artist and environmental activist who has received numerous awards from institutions like the Guggenheim Foundation and the United States National Endowment for the Arts, has dedicated a large part of her work to protecting the wetlands.

Cuando la tierra tiembla (2006) is a visual document of the human drama of exile, migration and displacement. The video draws on the circumstances of the Mexican community residing in New York to look at the situation of emigrants on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Their testimonies, along with those of members of associations who work with ‘illegals,’ form the central thread that runs through the story.

India is a place of abundant contrasts: part of the population lives in full post-modernity, modernity can still be found in another, while another segment - perhaps the majority of the population - lives anchored in feudalism. From a western standpoint, Indian film is a complex thing that breaks with the aesthetic codes and parameters established in the West in its themes and forms. Understanding it means delving into the culture and idiosyncrasy of its peoples.

In Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, a group of HIV-infected women created a network called Tapologo. Working with nurses from their community, they transformed misery and degradation into resistance and hope. Catholic bishop Kevin Dowling helped them, raising doubts about the sexual and moral doctrine of the Church in this context.

The camera never stops moving while it follows the operation of emptying the Huerta de San Vicente of all of its contents - paintings, furniture, rugs, flowerpots, knickknacks, a piano - leaving it clean and bare, and accompanying the objects wrapped in semi-transparent plastic to a storage site where they are placed in a pile.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents a selection of works from the Colección Pi Fernandino in Madrid, one of the few private collections that concentrates on works done in audiovisual format from recent decades.