Film and Video

Within the framework of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, artist Trevor Paglen and journalist and programmer Jacob Appelbaum debate the increase of government surveillance and the way in which this affects people’s freedom and their ability to act.

This film season continues a series of programmes that have addressed the change to structures, narrations and methods of film-making in recent Spanish cinema. With three editions to date, The Memory of Disrepute develops, through double sessions, how other cinema invents its own genealogy, exercising a discontinuous and partisan history of recent cinema.

Appropriating the theme raised by Richard Hamilton in his well-known 1956 collage, this seminar examines the crossover between artistic practices and popular culture that gave rise to multiple phenomena associated with Pop Art. With participation from Kerstin Stakemeier, Eloy Fernández Porta, Diedrich Diederichsen and Benjamin Buchloh.

Short Dance Films is a touring programme that includes a selection of forty-five short dance films produced in Europe in recent years. It is curated by Núria Font/NU2’s, commissioned by the European Dancehouse Network, a network with the participation of 20 dance houses from 16 countries.

This programme presents pop confronting pop, recognising the seduction of consumer culture whilst also keeping it at a critical distance. In relation to the exhibition devoted to Richard Hamilton, this series approaches the popular as subversion and as an investigation into the characteristics of a new society that emerged between the 1950s and 1970s.

Performing Gender is a European project that takes a critical look at the politics of gender and sexuality using dance and performance tools. Bodies and their multiple gender inscriptions are the subject of exploration and experimentation by a group of artists that, over the course of one year, have carried out their research by touring around different European institutions.

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film, with their work condensing a complex palimpsest of voices that, found between nascent politics of representation, put forward a language of diaspora.

This activity introduces the artist’s first individual exhibition in Europe, Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (13 June – 26 October, 2014), as he presents his work as an analysis of Afro-American racial identity and the space of the black subject, both in the current social context and in official history.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.

Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the annual celebration of International Museum Day (IMD) with two open days and a selection of activities that aim to take a deeper look at the dialogue between the collections and the public, as well as reinforcing the idea of the museum as a space for non-disciplinary education and collective learning.

This seminar forms part of a tri-annual project that explores expanded theatricalities in different areas: the public sphere, the city, the home, networks of affection, schools and educational spaces.