Seminars and Lectures

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.

This conversation takes place inside the public programme Dialogues, formulated by the museum confederation L’Internationale, and departs from four core areas, inviting different thinkers, artists and activists to address terms which resonate in the present. The activity sees political theorist Chantal Mouffe and the philosopher Didier Eribon debate the term populism in relation to citizen representation and cultural institutions.

This seminar, comprised of a series of lectures, addresses the transformations and surveys of modern utopia in post-war abstraction between Latin America and Eastern Europe.

How to rethink Guernica without reaffirming a canon linked to the universal and ahistorical condition of an icon? Scholars from different fields of knowledge - feminism, political theory, criticism and history of literature, cultural studies and history of art - will examine the work in its 80^th anniversary from different concepts and references. Juliet Mitchell and Mignon Nixon, Chantal Mouffe, Lucy Lippard, José-Carlos Mainer, Dario Gamboni and Maurizio Lazzarato and Eric Alliez are part of this series of lectures which seeks to understand and challenge the current influence of the mural.

This activity introduces the thinking of the Brazilian intellectual inside the space of the retrospective dedicated to his work. The talk seeks to disseminate his main ideas in connection with the artists and works that accompany his reflections. Mário Pedrosa (Pernambuco, 1900 – Rio de Janeiro, 1981) was a tireless critic and historian and the author of a unique concept of modernity, whereby art, as he put it, is the “experimental exercise of freedom”.

In Brazil, in 1959, the International Congress of Art Critics was held, a symposium where artists, architects, art and architectural historians were brought together to debate the role of modernity in a new world surfacing in the post-war period. This new reading of the minutes sets out to activate the document, understood as a performative exercise of a past utopian episode that still has huge potency and resonates in a present time in which art history and critique have been displaced from their role and public influence.

En estas conferencias se analizarán y ampliarán las ideas claves de la exposición Piedad y terror en Picasso. El camino a Guernica. En concreto, se atenderá a cómo la guerra –a través de sus imágenes, su tecnología y la progresiva aniquilación de una serie de valores hasta entonces estables-, dejó su impronta en la obra de Picasso, conduciendo a la transformación de la misma idea de arte moderno. El ciclo contará con intervenciones de TJ Clark, Anne Wagner, Rosario Peiró, Charlie Miller, Nancy Berthier y Eugenio Carmona.

This seminar, framed inside the European network Midstream, seeks to reflect on the role of culture in those social movements that vindicate uses of urban space outside a city model which looks towards art to strengthen tourist imaginaries, thus conditioning its institutions and reception. The lectures, held in Málaga, examine the way Picasso is used to shape the contemporary city.

Inside the framework of International Women’s Day, a conversation is set up between anthropologist Rita Laura Segato and sociologist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar as they seek to pinpoint the inequalities that still exist today under a range of focal points: from gender violence and domestic slavery to the coloniality of power used strategically as an objective of war by some states.

On the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to the artist Bruce Conner, Bruce Conner. It’s All True, at the Museo Reina Sofía (from February 22 to May 22, 2017), an encounter is presented between specialists Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels that seeks to analyze the influence of the creator in current artistic practices. Over the last decade, a number of artists have turned their attention to artistic figures from the last century who explored the production of hybrid forms, challenging artistic genres. In this sense, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is one of the most representative cases.

In conjunction with ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía sets up an encounter between different professionals from European and Latin American museum institutions. The aim is to create synergies, promote joint institutional projects and put forth a reflection on the role of museums at the present time.

Founded in Egypt with the publication of their manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, the Art et Liberté Group (1938 – 1948), proposed a new understanding of Surrealism. This presentation also studies their visual and literary contributions beyond the polemics of post-colonial discourse, advocating for a new art-historical understanding of the Surrealist movement.

Museo Reina Sofía is holding an event in memory of Elena Asins (1940–2015), on the one-year anniversary of her death. The activity aims to look back at the uniqueness of an artist dedicated to exploring an abstract language which radically differed from the sensible world, and also acknowledges a broader generation of historians, theorists, poets and artists committed to investigating the limits and potential of abstraction in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. 

In conjunction with the XVI Madrid Science Week, the Museo Reina Sofía is joined by the IPCE, Spain’s Cultural Heritage Institute, to organise within its programme of activities the following technical encounter: The Surrealist Object. Anoxia, Display Cases and Chocolate.

The Museo Reina Sofía hosts the opening session of Starting from Peter Weiss, organised by the Centro de Documentación Crítica (Critical Documentation Centre) to commemorate the centenary of the German dramatist’s birth. 

This master lecture, in conjunction with the seminar Dance, Gender and Nation: 1930–1960, is given by Mahalia Lassibille, head professor of the Department of Dance at the University of Paris 8 and an anthropologist specialised in Africa. Lassibille has focused her research on the uses of dance categories, particularly “traditional African dance” and “contemporary African dance”, and their choreographic effects.

Within the framework of the retrospective Txomin Badiola. Another Family Plot (until 26 February, 2017), held in the Museo Reina Sofía, this round-table discussion brings together a series of artists for whom formalism is articulated with a double meaning: gliding or camouflage.

The programme Documentos, which revolves around themes related to the Museo Reina Sofía Documentation Centre, presents its first activity: Art, Words and Memory in the Texts of Gómez de Liaño, a round-table discussion which looks at the output of Ignacio Gómez de Liaño.

Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 - Cologne, 1976) is a key figure of contemporary art, and a reference point and driving force in many current discourses and practices. Following his initial work as a poet, journalist and photographer, in 1964 Broodthaers decided to become a visual artist, and from that moment on concerns with providing a response to the basic questions posed by visual arts can be discerned as he interrogated the idea of representation and the production of meaning through the use of existing knowledge systems. In this round-table discussion Christophe Cherix, Jean-François Chevrier, Dirk Snauwaert and Manuel Borja-Villel will debate the different readings around the founder of the fictional museum.

Dance, gender and nation, three closely bound concepts within the context of contemporary Western culture, and the thematic cornerstones of this seminar. The focal point is the period spanning the second third of the 20^th century - a period of upheaval in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929 and the rise of the totalitarianism that would trigger the outbreak of the Second World War shortly afterwards.

Inside the framework of the 2015-2016 Research Residencies, the playwright, stage director, writer and visual artist Javier Montero puts forward a project of critical research and collective production regarding the different forms of creativity, and the role they play in producing new subjectivities.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, the Geosciences Institute (CSIC-UCM), and the YOCOCU (YOuth in COnservation of CUltural Heritage) association have organized the fifth edition of the International Conference on Youth in Conservation of Cultural Heritage, celebrated from 21 to 23 September at the auditoriums of Nouvel Building.

This seminar analyses the role of Ulises Carrión (Mexico, 1941 - Holland, 1989) in conceiving new strategies to disseminate and distribute art from the mid-seventies, and the emphasis he placed on reinventing the uses, forms and appearances of the book as a device for action. 

The Interventions by Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum will analyse two interrelated problems. On one side, the production processes of hegemony in the current crisis scenario by the new social blocs emerging in Europe, and on the other, the cultural political economy related to current debates on the civilising change the human species is currently undergoing.

The international conference Cold Atlantic will examine the artistic, cultural and aesthetic exchanges produced between the USA, Europe, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War. The aim is to highlight the axes of alignment and artistic exchange between the geopolitically minor actors that were trapped inside the huge theatrical strategy from this period.

J. M. Coetzee is regarded as a writer of ideas. His literary work bears a distinctly philosophical imprint that is often woven around allegory, yet his stark, analytical view of racial conflict in South Africa, his country of origin, has not stood in the way of a broader horizon and an interest in other universally ethical and pressing causes, for instance the suffering and exploitation of animals, conceived as fragile and dispossessed beings, an issue which takes prominence in his intervention in the Museo.

At the present time, Humanities have lost the Renaissance concept stemming from the linguistic, social and philosophical-historical disciplines that were at every level of the formal education still taught a few decades back. The processes of globalisation inscribed in capitalist systems have prioritised education as a field of pragmatic knowledge at the expense of those disciplines engaged in the formation of civilised social coexistence and the role of citizenship understood from responsibility.