Seminars and Lectures

In conjunction with his exhibition The Rocket and the Abyss (5 May to 2 October, 2016), held in the Palacio de Cristal, Damián Ortega will engage in conversation with Peio Aguirre to discuss his publishing work.

Inside the framework of Constituent Machines: Constituent Power, Biopolitics, Democracy, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold the second session in the programme of lectures and seminars, on this occasion conducted by Wolfgang Streeck.

Within the context of the networks in which the Museo Reina Sofía participates alongside collectives, organisations and independent research groups, the Museo’s Study Centre welcomes the conference Domesticities, organised by the Las Raras collective.

The Museo Reina Sofía will host a lecture and seminar by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to take place within the context of the programme Constituent Machines: Constituent Power, Biopolitics, Democracy, jointly organised with the Commons Foundation, and in collaboration with Intermediae.

New Babylon (1956–1974) is a networked city project conceived by the Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys for the “total fulfilment of life”, an approach to urbanism based on the freedom of the individual through the power of play and creativity. This activity, which marks the end of the retrospective in the Museo devoted to Constant, examines this total artwork’s place in the utopian urbanism that followed World War Two through a lecture by Anthony Vidler and a round-table discussion featuring participation from José Miguel de Prada Poole, Izaskun Chinchilla, José Pérez de Lama and Ethel Baraona.

In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse.

The Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre organises this encounter around the thinking of Rosi Braidotti, in reference to the publication of her book The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013). The intervention sees Rossi Braidotti explore the “posthuman turn”, understood as an event based on the convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism.

Independent theatre groups in Spain revamped the stage from popular culture, university classrooms, alternative circuits and touring as a form of representation. As a whole, they represent a key chapter in the history of 20^th-century theatre in Spain, and this seminar, integrated into a broader network project, looks to remedy the absence of debates and studies around this crucial subject.

The confrontation between abstraction-realism and artistic imagination-social commitment has polarised a major part of 20th-century art history, dividing fronts, periods and movements from both sides. Yet the work of Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) constitutes an exceptional chapter; the painter imagined a universe that was free from Biomorphic Abstraction whilst, on the back of the same painting, he figuratively documented the opposite: the existential suffering in the Second World War. This conversation introduces his work.

This double performance serves as an introduction to the Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Museo. The studied disappearance of the image in modern surveillance technology is developed in a performance lecture by the artist, followed by an exploration into the new acoustic landscape of war – between military noise and sounds from consumer devices - by Kassem Mosse. Both performances are a posthumous homage to Harun Farocki.

The Falckenberg Collection, built around the concept of art as a space of revolt, assembles one of the most salient historical ensembles of art criticism in post-war Germany and America. In the face of complacency over the market and its logics, this collection represents a counter-current to ways of understanding the role of and narratives that stem from collecting.

This encounter, within the framework of the project Redes, from the Museo’s Study Centre, sees sociologist Christian Laval and philosopher Pierre Dardot set out a reflection of “the common” as a strategic paradigm for considering new socio-economic and political concepts of use in the design of new forms of democratic organisation that go beyond the categories of representation and political sovereignty that are consubstantial with modernity.

Iconoclasm, desire, vulnerability, migration and cultural translation are some of the themes that impress particular intensity upon the work of Danh Vō. This encounter, also held in the Palacio de Cristal, sees the artist enter into conversation with Patricia Falguières, professor at the École des hautes etudes in social sciences in Paris, and author of essays such as Les Chambres de merveilles (Bayard, 2002).

This encounter serves as an introduction to the retrospective devoted to Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (Karachi, 1937 – Baroda, 1990), an exhibition that looks to acknowledge the specific nature of her work, beyond the canonical accounts that have systematically placed it within minimalist abstraction.

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.

The international conference Politics, State Power and the Making of Art History in Europe after 1945 explores the ways political power seeks to shape and influence the activities of art historians, art critics, museum professionals and cultural institutions in order to control the understanding of art and artistic heritage from 1945 to the present.

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.

What are innovation and originality in diverse times? How does the precarious artist participate in the so-called economies of creativity? This lecture sees the Argentinian philosopher and cultural critic Néstor García Canclini analyse the redistributions and alternatives to creativity that come together in a new contemporary framework of institutions, movements, audiences and networks.

Founded by intellectuals such as Mario Pedrosa, Dore Ashton, Carlo Levi and the Spanish critic José María Moreno Galván, this institution represented a brief experience that, while connecting Chile and Palestine, Senegal and the spaces of resistance in the Western world between 1971 and 1973, was used to seek alternative references during the Cold War. This talk by its director, Claudia Zaldívar, introduces its history and recovery. 

In relation to the exhibition Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, this series of lectures offers a context for the discussion on the reframing of documentary culture in the 1970s and 1980s. The programme brings together international scholars to debate some of the key aspects of the exhibition from different perspectives.

This encounter serves as an introduction to the exhibition in the Museo devoted to North American artist Carl Andre (Quincy, Massachusetts, 1935) and looks to provide perspective on an artistic career that spans the second half of the 20^th century and which has been historiographically defined by its generational affiliation with the time Minimalism embarked upon the redefinition of sculpture.

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.

This programme of activities, which relates Sahrawi culture to a broader social and cultural framework, aims to become tuiza, a space that reimagines an alternative possible geography, where its centres are not metropolises of financial power, but narrations and accounts of a periphery that lives on in expressions of identity and cultural contamination.

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.

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.

Within the framework of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, artist Trevor Paglen and journalist and programmer Jacob Appelbaum debate the increase of government surveillance and the way in which this affects people’s freedom and their ability to act.

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 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.

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.