Seminars and Lectures

Started in 2010, the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme of master lectures marks the beginning, or end, of the annual academic activity conducted in the Museo, comprising a series of MAs, study programmes, debate groups and research residencies, run in collaboration with different universities.

This seminar sets out to rewrite the history of post-war art in Europe, traditionally presented as the disjointed amalgamation of art scenes divided into antagonistic blocs. By deconstructing national limits and articulating a transversal debate, this programme presents a divergent history, whilst also identifying new voices and positions.

The Internet has produced new behaviours, subjectivities and institutions linked to another way of being and doing. This seminar debates how these changes throw established categories of art, the author and the circulation of unique work off balance, whilst also forming profound contradictions – from creativity as an economic value to indistinct work time. Is considering another artistic ecosystem possible from these ambiguities?

Organize with the occasion of ARCOmadrid, this meeting aims to provide a space for reflection where art professionals working in museums and contemporary art centres can exchange ideas about the possibilities that this exhibition format offers to their institutions.

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.

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.

Presented as the culmination of the course on critical practices developed by Observatorio Metropolitano in the Museo, this seminar addresses the recent waves and movements of democracy, from Latin America to the Arab Spring. Over three days the sociologists Asef Bayat and Luis Tapia Mealla will debate the new international constituent situation.

The exhibition Playgrounds takes a historical and political approach to space for play and its socialising and transgressive potential. In dialogue with the exhibition, this course and seminar debates the expansion of art towards spheres of institutional experimentation and intervention in public space, ultimately endeavouring to highlight the role of play in new modes of contemporary subjectivation.

The transformations in Europe over the past three decades challenge national historical/critical narratives, and those based on apparent global continuity. This debate explores how art practices have influenced these situations in constant flux, calling into question these narratives and imagining possible alternatives.

With regard to the acknowledgement of research networks in different fields and new methods of collection and dissemination stemming from archive practices, the Museo Reina Sofía presents this project. MASE is a collective of researchers, critics and artists connected to sound art and an innovative online archive and platform in a traditionally ignored field.

This encounter reflects on the formation of a new type of European political and cultural agency following the exhaustion of a union based on the market economy and on the precarious geopolitical balance of the States.

This activity presents the research conducted by Pulska Grupa, a Croatian collective of architects and urban planners who have been research residents at Museo Reina Sofía in 2012-2013.

This project is conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, the aim of which is generate proposals based on a critical diagnosis of the contemporary art system in Spain.

With the participation of Armando Montesinos, Mariano Navarro and Juan Pablo Wert, this activity presents the exhibition Idea: Painting-Force. 

This series of three seminars is an interuniversity partnership project based on the collaborative work of a diverse group of researchers. The debate platform, with the participation of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Universidad de Navarra and the Museo Reina Sofía, analyses art education at a time in which academic teaching hovers between the creative industry and the specificity of the artist's role.

Film on the margins, from the peripheries, and the other cinema are among the terms used to refer to works that have been made outside the industry in recent years in Spain. Beyond this condition of existence, a number of additional criteria are fulfilled by these films, suggesting something of a group identity. More specifically: independent production and distribution platforms, the incorporation of the experimental language used in the field of art (exhibition video and film) and the liberal use of documentary techniques in the form of essay film are some of the features found throughout this other cinema.

This international event, which brings together researchers, artists and curators from both sides of the Atlantic, seeks to stimulate reflection about the notion of avant-garde in relation to the experience and discourse of modernity between 1920 and 1970.

When trying to understand the impact that artistic practices have on the public sphere, people usually speak of a confrontation between art and politics. In this seminar, comprised of a lecture and a workshop, Brian Holmes takes a step beyond this dichotomy, and situates art, once again, in relation to existential affections, forms of organisation, bodies and theory. 

The new direction taken by political and social happenings in recent years has once again made public space an excellent place for manifestations by the community. In contrast with the situation during the last third of the 20th century, dissident action does not avoid urban spectacularization, hiding in private or clandestine spheres. Instead it transforms and is shown in public space. This seminar explores the use of “theatrical” gestures, behaviours and performances in social space for the purpose of expressing disagreement and dissidence, and it also examines the way that today's art, specifically theatre, has taken in and dialogued with these non-artistic theatricalities.

This post-graduate course, associated with the research project "After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art from 1931 to 1981" (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation HAR2011-25864), is conceived as an introduction to the evolution, creation, promotion and historiographic fate of Spanish art, in times of peace and war and both within and outside the country, over a period of five decades. The period examined spans the Republic, the Civil War and dictatorship-exile.

This program aims to explore the notion of avant-garde as it relates to the experience of modernity and to the shaping of the political and aesthetic vanguardia by post-war art and politics between 1920 and 1970. The specific nature of avant-garde and neo avant-garde practices, and the way in which transnational dialogue helped delineate artistic discourses in Spain and Latin America, will be the reflections guiding this event.

The recent 40th anniversary of the book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From object art to concept art) affords an excellent opportunity to analyse the trajectory of a book that is both a history and a manifesto of the new artistic practices in the 1970s.

This seminar seeks to contribute to the discussion begun by the exhibition Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010 (MUSAC, León, 24 June 2012 - 23 February 2013). This exhibition, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, highlights the role of discourses concerning gender and sexual identities in contemporary Spanish art, a topic traditionally ignored by historiography. The project, in parallel with the successive rearrangements of the Museum's Collection, proposes a rereading of recent art history in Spain, with different eyes and from a different perspective, recovering the work of many female artists who have been unfairly disdained.

This seminar studies audiovisual works that use methodologies and processes of a collective nature at different levels. This seminar juxtaposes three fundamental lines of work related to the politics of collaborative practices in the field of images: the audiovisual production of new imaginaries, the participatory experiences they undergo upon reception and a pedagogy of the collective image.

Overshadowed by the orthodox histories of the avant-garde, the figure of María Blanchard has several aspects that have resulted in her being relegated to a secondary, and decidedly minor, position. These aspects include her condition as a woman and her distance from the prevailing cubist grammars. At this seminar Eugenio Carmona, Carmen Bernárdez, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Xon de Ros and María José Salazar present some new frameworks for better understanding the artist and, at the same time, the historical avant-gardes.

This seminar aims to reflect on new emerging political coordinates and their meaning in a globalised world. Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano and Ignacio Castro address these questions through different critical and diagnostic notions developed in recent political philosophy.

This seminar brings together Juan Manuel Bonet, Fernando Castro Flórez and José Díaz Cuyás, with the idea of questioning the construction of the recent narrations of the last few decades of art in Spain. The seminar engages in a critique of the interpretations of Nacho Criado as an artist focused on the idea of the collapse of language and on the idea of art.

This symposium brings together a group of art historians whose work is known for its interdisciplinary approach, its innovative methodology and its relevance in meditating on the way we think about, write about and imagine art history today.

This seminar comprises some of the diverse research projects that have emerged in recent years and are geared towards questioning the hegemonic narratives that envelop the complex process of Spain’s transition to democracy. It is the outcome of a collaboration between the Museo and Brumaria.

This seminar intends to build a constellation of critical gazes regarding modern art in Latin America. It hopes to serve as the critical substratum that will help shape plans for the exhibition of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) of modern art that Museo will be organizing in 2013.

At this round table, the artist, theorists and project participants debate the exhibition Entre/Between, from its narrative components up through its spatial arrangement and the way it speaks to the public.

Guernica, a testimony and condemnation of the bombing by Franco's forces of the Basque town of the same name is considered a foundational work of 20th century art and it continues to be a universal symbol of the struggle against oppression. Its arrival in Madrid in September of 1981 was presented as the symbolic conclusion of Spain's transition to democracy following the dictatorship. The complicated diplomatic negotiations undertaken to bring about the painting's move were also the first important steps in cultural policy to be taken by the country's new government, and they highlighted the role that avant-garde art would play in the official culture of Spain's young democracy. With its arrival, it ceased to be the emblem of dissidence against the dictatorship and became the symbol of the healing of the fracture between the two historical factions in Spain: a sign of the reconciliation upon which the new democratic society would be based.

Five hundred years into the invention of America, and two hundred years after the birth of the first Latin American republics, a question appears, like an inescapable shadow, hidden in the very name comprising these countries: Is it possible to think about a thing called Latin America? Is it even possible to think of it as a unit that can be grasped? Evidently, the answer is no. However, the main issue eludes this contradiction inasmuch as the name given to this part of the world calls for general reflections that encompass the whole and also multiple reflections that go further and take into account particular questions relevant to each geographical area.

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.

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.

Encounters with the 1930s is a symposium that begins with a line of questions about a decade that has haunted historic and contemporary ideas about art and politics, artistic autonomy, and the pressure of context on artistic production.

This seminar is divided into four roundtables that attempt to interrogate the historical and intellectual coordinates of Warburg’s project, and then to discuss the primary questions about the nature of the image formulated in Atlas that resonate in current debates.

A seminar aimed at reconsidering the contemporary condition of the spectator, attempting to look over parallels that have often been drawn between audiences and society, as well as reflecting on the forms of participation that have subverted the simplistic dichotomies of identification and critical distance.

The research residencies inside the Study Centre look to integrate the Museo’s visitors and workspaces and the university, bringing research time into the museum context and the relationship capacity within the academic sphere. The results of this first edition are presented in successive presentations with diverse formats.

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.