Seminars and Lectures

James Lingwood, curator of the exhibition Luigi Ghirri. The Map and the Territory (Museo Reina Sofía 26 September 2018 – 7 January 2019), will lead a guided visit to the exhibit just before the opening with the aim of introducing the main ideas supporting Ghirri’s artistic practice. Ghirri is a key author for understanding postmodern photography and some of its fundamental theses, such as the blurring of reality with fiction and the extreme codification of representation in today’s world. 

This third session in the series Six Contradictions and the End of the Present is centred on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, activist and African American theorist, and Yayo Herrero, anthropologist, technical engineer, social educator and ecofeminist. These sessions will reflect on racial difference and care as a point of departure for contemplating a more just and equal society, putting forward a life which is possible outside ideas of production and economic value.

This program emerges out of the need to bring together ideas on the illnesses we suffer from, at a time when the welfare state has given way to a type of governance centered on the proliferation of new disorders, diseases, and medications.

This encounter, organised under the framework of the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, reflects on the connections between artistic practices, extreme violence and the precariousness of life.

This encounter, held in relation to the exhibition An Approach to Afal. The Autric-Tamayo Donation, recollects the central space occupied by the Afal collective in post-war Spanish photography. A conversation between two of its leading figures, photographers Ramón Masats and Carlos Pérez Siquier, and the show’s curator, Laura Terré, will be followed by the screening of Alberto Gómez Uriol’s documentary Afal, una mirada libre (Afal, a Free Gaze), which assembles declarations from the majority of its members.

This series of lectures reflects on the new forms of materiality underlying contemporaneity. The art of recent decades has been shaped by its taking the processes of dematerialisation described by Lucy Lippard in the late 1960s to the extreme; namely, the now off-centre position of the object, the development of project-based practices, the changes to the status of art work and the displacement of the concept of authorship.

As part of the A possible strength: towards a poietics of living together activities program, this reading group and collective reflection emerge with the goal of revisiting a past that reverberates in the present.

This conference is part of a collaboration set up between the Museo Reina Sofía and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (the Open University of Catalonia) for the completion of a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts. Oriented towards critical and reflective studies, it sets out from a contemporary and expansive notion of Fine Arts which questions the traditional limits of artistic practice.

In this course, writer Servando Rocha will survey the deviations and disbandment of Dada, in addition to its repeated resurrection in popular culture, sound experiments and a wave of on-the-edge situations running from the Surrealists to the Lettrists, from Fluxus to Situationists, from punk to guerrilla communication, ending up at noise and experimental music.      

This lecture leads into an annual series which explores the relationship between tourism imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. Once a year, an innovative case study will be presented which reflects on how mass tourism, as an industry of experience, has been linked to the search for experience characterising art since 1960.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist.

For this session of the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017). In the lecture, the philosopher explores new forms of power and domination; the workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author and, as a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro.

In conjunction with the opening of Marc Pataut. First Attempts, the galleries of the exhibition will play host to a conversation between the artist and Jorge Ribalta, the show’s curator, on photography as an instrument for capturing life at its most vulnerable and precarious, and as a  public service and a form of institutional critique. Other issues addressed will include the ethics of representation of the disadvantaged subject and, ultimately, the reasons why photography remains pivotal as an artistic practice of the real. 

The Words of Others remains a theatre of the present because the condemnation of stances and modes is repeated, as are the authoritarian drift, inequality and segregation as forms of domination. It is no wonder that an artist hitherto focused on producing ceramics, sculptures and drawings ended up creating a theatrical collage with which to intervene in the present he faced: the real-time clash with the public sphere proved to be the most effective approach for a practice in need of becoming politically active.

The joint presentation of the Cubism Collections of the Telefónica Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía affords an opportunity to reconsider conventional narratives of the Cubist experience. This day-long seminar responds to this need, setting out to address diverse conceptions in the Cubist experience and aiming to encapsulate Cubism’s capacity for dissemination and refraction.

The programme Pessoa: A Brief History of Modern Art, accompanying and serving as a counterpoint to Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature, an exhibition organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which focuses on the Portuguese avant-garde through a reading of the work of the Portuguese poet, seeks, via different perspectives, to offer an approach to one of the most complex, enigmatic and multifarious narratives in literature.

This third session culminates the program "Pessoa: brief history of modern art", a series of three talks in which some of the theoretical keys of modern art are reviewed from the writings of Fernando Pessoa. This last intervention will be carried out by the novelist and essayist Tom McCarthy. The author of Satin Island or Remainder is one of the most debated and acclaimed contemporary experimental writers.

The meteoric rise of digital giants worldwide has posed a raft of unsettling questions on the concentration of political, economic and social power in the hands of tech brokers.

This session will analyse and discuss the possible alternatives to this invisible and all-powerful government of the algorithm and Big Data, ranging from the design of new data ownership models to algorithms being subjected to audits, via the creation of cooperate platforms or the comprehensive nationalisation of technology platforms. 

In conjunction with the actions to be organised worldwide by the feminist movement on 8 March 2018, the Museo Reina Sofía will initiate a round-table discussion, setting out to offer a space of reflection and coordination between different stances and voices that are currently active in Madrid.

The Jorge Oteiza Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía present the book Oteiza. Catálogo razonado de escultura (Oteiza. Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture), a critical survey of the work of the artist which compiles and analyses 2,752 pieces from public and private collections, including those which hold a prominent position in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collection 2: Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945–1968). The book also sets forth a reflection on the notion of “cataloguing”, or “normalising”, an artist who forever evaded all normalisation.

The programme Documents explores the book as an artistic medium, the possibilities and narratives of the archive, independent publishing and dissemination, and other strands of research in relation to the work of the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre. This fifth session is devoted to a conversation with the artist Francesc Abad and the recent publication of the book Napa(s). Persistir en lo inacabado [Napa(s). Persist with the Unfinished] (Ediciones La Bahía, 2017).

Within the framework of the exhibition George Herriman. Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat, the Museum organizes a conference with the author of comics Art Spiegelman. The creator of Maus (1986) will explore his vision of the comic understood as a battle zone in postliterary times, in which art and commerce, high culture and popular, adult and child, reality and fantasy and, above all, the words and images collide with each other with special intensity.

In conjunction with the historical re-enactment of the performance We Forge The Future, by the industrial rock band Laibach — a member of the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) — in the Museo Reina Sofía, one of the band’s members, Ivan Novak, will lead a guided tour of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia.

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In conjunction with the film series The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, the artist and film-maker Peter Kubelka will conduct a workshop on filmic creation, centred on debate and experimentation. The workshop will see Kubelka present and debate his work with the audience.

On the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough (November 1, 2017 - March 19, 2018), the artist gives a performative lecture that analyzes his relationship with the drawing and the creative process.

The Museo Reina Sofía master lectures, which mark the start of the Study Centre’s academic activity every year, set out to explore the different approaches and methodologies which have stretched art history in recent times. These lectures, which came into being in 2010, have been conducted by eminent art historians and theorists such as Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán and Benjamin Buchloh.

In conjunction with Palimpsest, the installation Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958) will display in the Palacio de Cristal from 6 October, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter between the artist and the historian Estrella de Diego, where both will examine how art confronts the way in which violence perforates each gesture, object and situation in contemporary society.

The role the archive plays in contemporary culture, by virtue of its powerful metaphorical potential and as a tool of knowledge and resistance, has been broadly explored in many exhibitions, publications and encounters over the past two decades.

As a culmination of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with the artist Franz Erhard Walther (Fulda, 1939), featuring the participation of Elena Filipovic, Christian Rattemeyer and João Fernandes. The conversation also serves as an accompaniment to a series of activations performed by Walther.