Seminars and Lectures

The Museo marks the 55^th anniversary of the OuLiPo group with two activities: The presentation of the work 66 Exercises in Style by Colectivo Armadillo, and a discussion which revolves around the group, which includes participation from illustrious specialists and certain members of this historic literary experiment.

This encounter brings together Martha Rosler (New York, 1943) and the historian and theorist of photography Jorge Ribalta. The activity signals the start of the exhibition Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernity and looks to debate some of the question marks it raises.

This encounter sees Daniel G. Andújar engage in conversation with the curator of the exhibition, Manuel Borja-Villel, and a critic with extensive knowledge of his output, Iris Dressler, to look at some of the key aspects of the artist’s work. The role of the artist in the new cultural ecosystem and the Internet as a utopian, and also repressive, space are some of the themes touched upon.

This encounter serves as an introduction to the site-specific installation The Marionette Maker (Palacio de Cristal, from 19 November to 16 March, 2015), and the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller as a whole, with both artists engaging in conversation with João Fernandes, the curator of the project and deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía.

A programme of actions and activities within the context of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, devised by the collective Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní and Virginia Villaplana). These actions take place inside the galleries of the exhibition and feature participation from different social and cultural collectives.

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.

Artist and writer engage in conversation, dialogue that coincides with the opening of SPLENDIDE-HOTEL, a site-specific project carried out by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in the Palacio de Cristal. Fiction within reality, compulsive reading or literature as a tool for understanding the world, these are elements shared by both and mark an ongoing collaboration.

Part of the ARCOmadrid International Contemporary Art Fair, this meeting will bring together professionals from museums and private collections around the theme Private collecting and common heritage: proposals for a discussion.

This activity brings together a group of writers and theorists representative of the return to the essay as a type of writing that is both prospective and interrogative.

This event serves as an introduction to the exhibition Biographical forms with a lecture by its curator, Jean-François Chevrier, followed by a colloquium with two of the artists represented.

At this program, the curators Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec present the premises of the exhibition ± I96I. Founding the Expanded Arts, followed by an intervention by Simone Forti in the auditorium and concluding with the representation of several of her pieces in the exhibition galleries. 

Museum curators and international specialists gather to discuss the challenges faced by cultural institutions in their endeavour to activate and disseminate contemporary art. The seminar, designed to stimulate dialogue between Europe and Latin America, centers on the search for effective means of cooperation regarding production, research, memory and education.

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.

Eric Andersen (Antwerp, 1940) has been linked to Fluxus from practically the very beginning. In 1962, he had the idea of organising a festival in Copenhagen's Nikolai Church. Before that he was involved in setting up art-poetry networks throughout Europe. His participation in this Festum Fluxorum, as the most public and festive qualities of Fluxus were known, was the beginning of a long collaboration in an array of Fluxus events that continue to this day.

This activity sees artist Sharon Hayes enter into dialogue with Beatriz Preciado, coordinator of the seminar Somateca, and students from the Critical Practices Programme, as well as the general public with an interest in the subject. The encounter marks the start of an individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo, entitled Habla.

In this talk, Haacke and the art critic and historian Walter Grasskamp look at several decades of this dialectic of tension between the artist and the museums. The dialogue consists of a diachronic examination of the artist's fifty years of production, by looking at ten works commented in relation to their different institutional models and contexts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Co-occurring with the public opening of the exhibition Desire Rises from Collapse, an encounter is presented between Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby and Ana Longoni, art historian and curator of the exhibition. The conversation looks ahead to and questions the lines and set-up of the exhibition project.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a conversation will take place between the artist Dorit Margreiter, Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Lynne Cooke, the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of the Museo.