Seminars and Lectures

This programme sees the Museo Reina Sofía bring together an ensemble of initiatives that will be held over the coming months (from lectures and workshops, exhibitions and digital projects, to guided tours and presentations of the Collection), encompassing the wide-ranging forms of feminist revolt present in our day-to-day.

In conjunction with ARCOmadrid 2020, the Museo Reina Sofía has organised an encounter among different professionals from museum institutions, both in Europe and Latin America, in order to create synergies, promote institutional collaboration and set forth a critical reflection on the role museums must play in relation to the society that promotes them.

The Documents programme, which explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice, pays homage in this edition to Guy Schraenen (1941–2018).

After the Event focuses on the progression of the social uprisings that occurred between 2010 and 2013. From Turkey to Spain, Greece, Syria and Egypt, the locations of this unrest, the movements shook existing political systems and, at times, even brought them to their knees.

The Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre inaugurates a study area on photography, by Jorge Ribalta, that aims to encourage photographic studies by following a social and cultural focus. This programme, developed through a broad array of activities — seminars, lectures, guided tours, encounters— also seeks to put in place a network between different focal points of research, with national and international scope, to work towards shaping a discursive public sphere on photography and its theories, practices and history.

Over the past 30 years, World AIDS Day has been commemorated on 1 December. During this period, the protests, struggles and actions related to what life with HIV entails have varied, depending on the different stages of the AIDS crisis.

Inside the framework of Museo Situado, a network of collaboration with different migrant collectives and associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood and the Museo Reina Sofía, this new edition of Situated Voices explores the different artistic and feminist approaches to the notion of debt, understood as an instrument of economic, political and cultural domination.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s alignment with the celebration of LGTBIQ+ Pride is based on the archive, tracing the footsteps of experiences which have been systematically banished from collective memory.

In conjunction with the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually to remember those who have been killed through transphobia, hate and fear, the Museo Reina Sofía will organise an encounter to present the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Archive of Trans Memory, AMT).

The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. On this occasion, artist Azucena Vieites will conduct a workshop on collective practices related to the feminist and queer fanzine.

This encounter, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía, welcomes poets Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and artist Susan Bee, all with close ties to the Language poetry movement, to perform readings and present their past and present work, as well as engage in conversation with the attending audience.

The second edition of the Aníbal Quijano Chair sets up a dialogue between two experiences of communal feminisms, understood as the grounds from which to build other ways of life: the farms and gyneceum’s of the Kurdish Confederation, a democratic organisation that questions the state logic of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria; and the movement of public Afro-Latin American self-organisation in Colombia.

The 1936 coup d’état and the ensuing civil war splintered reality, the pieces scattering across complex [in]exiles, disappearances, silences… faltering and inconclusive narratives, fertile, multifocal and widespread memories that pulse and throb today, cross-examining the present and managing to distort a univocal, hegemonic gaze.

Coinciding with the start of the 2019–2020 academic year, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites intellectual Stephen Eisenman (New York, USA, 1956) to take part in its programme of master lectures.

The Documents programme explores the relationships between art and publishing, and other subjects that include the effects of archive on narratives of art history, the artist’s book and publishing as an artistic practice. This edition, therefore, presents the Centre audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir, an audiovisual archive that comprises the first feminist video in France and representations of women in the mass media. 

The third edition of the seminar Archives of the Commons, co-organised by the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) and the Museo Reina Sofía, takes as its point of departure a question that seeks to operate as a concept: Is it possible to put in place an archive as non-appropriable?

From a trans-hack-feminist perspective, researchers Laura Benítez and Paula Pin set forth this co-laboratory based on Do It Yourself and Do It Together bio(info)technology — namely, self-managed and collective forms of organisation, work, care, learning, and so on — with which to consider a critical review of gynaecology through tools and technology of biological exploration.

This eighth edition of Situated Voices, promoted by the Museo Situado network, an initiative in which different migrant collectives and neighbourhood associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood collaborate with the Museo Reina Sofía, reflects on the borders which obstruct crossings and refuge for people in the contemporary world.

This activity constitutes the second edition of the annual series Art and Tourism Imaginaries, which explores the relationship between tourism imaginaries and visual arts in Spain from the 1960s onwards.

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Kenyan novelist and essayist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (1938), one of the strongest voices in international and African literature and in the critical analysis of systems of thought tied to neocolonialism.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a performance lecture and poetry recital on gaucho poetry and its relationship to contemporary music, conducted by Argentinian musician Martín Bauer.

Inside the framework of the exhibition The Avant-Garde Networks of Amauta: Argentina, Mexico, and Peru in the 1920s (Museo Reina Sofía, 20 February – 27 May 2019), this session of activities seeks to examine relationships between indigenous identity, art, visual culture and the politics of representation on the continent, extending across three chronological landmarks: historical avant-garde movements (1919), neo-avant-garde movements and the crisis of the modern paradigm (1989) and contemporaneity (2019).