Seminars and Lectures

Presentation of the book La abeja y el economista (The Bee and the Economist), by Yann Moulier Bountang, co-editor of the magazine Multitudes and professor of political economy. He is one of the main people responsible for the design theory on the critique of the political economy of cognitive capitalism.

This activity sees artist Sharon Hayes enter into dialogue with Beatriz Preciado, coordinator of the seminar Somateca, and students from the Critical Practices Programme, as well as the general public with an interest in the subject. The encounter marks the start of an individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo, entitled Habla.

This event looks at the career of Raúl Zurita in a debate and then a poetry reading, both of which will take place in the Collection room dedicated to artistic activism in Latin America. This activity is also a presentation of the book Zurita, which have as a backdrop the military coup in Chile.

Rachel Haidu, professor at the University of Rochester (New York), debates the importance of staging, dramatic narration and the role of the actor in James Coleman’s work and in that of other artists influenced by his slide-tape works. This conference marks the start of the individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo.

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.

In this talk, Haacke and the art critic and historian Walter Grasskamp look at several decades of this dialectic of tension between the artist and the museums. The dialogue consists of a diachronic examination of the artist's fifty years of production, by looking at ten works commented in relation to their different institutional models and contexts.

This first session of Somatheque. Biopolitical production, feminisms, queer and trans practices explores the changes in the governmental methods of body production and of sexual difference that took place after World War II, with the transformation of war techniques into techniques of somatic production and communication.

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.

This conference presents recent examples of the work of the Radical Education collective, whose research deals with political imagination in art. The research process they put forward includes collective translations of Marx’s A Worker’s Inquiry, with the aim of questioning new modulations and regulations of work.

The public presentation of the Julián Díaz Sánchez research residency. This project analyses Spanish Informalism in relation to the exhibition New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, held in New York’s MoMA in 1960.

This presentation by Ángel González, Eva Rivas, José Luis Gallero and José María Parreño explores the life and work - inseparable from one another - of Quico Rivas. Cómo escribir de pintura sin que se note [How to write about painting without anybody noticing] is the name of a collection of critical texts written by the critic in the final years of his life.

This activity is divided into two sessions: a conference and guided visit through the rooms devoted to the Spanish Republic Pavilion. Both endeavour to contrast and draw connections between three exhibitions presented in Munich, Paris and New York in 1936 and 1937 in order to analyse the footprints of post-war art and the Museo’s Collection.

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 art critic and independent curator Santiago Olmo has a conversation with the artist Soledad Sevilla about the exhibition Written in the celestial bodies, a site-specific installation at Palacio de Cristal in Madrid's Parque del Retiro.

Comprised of a guided visit to the exhibition Fragments of memory, with commentary by the artist, followed by a colloquium with the audience, this workshop seeks to articulate both languages, that of the visible and that of the verbal, that of the artist and that of the audience or that of the exhibition and that of debate, as keys to understanding Elena Asins' work.

The exhibition Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel, is about the legacy of Raymond Roussel, one of the lateral histories of modern art. In this conversation, the exhibition's curators discuss the keys to understanding the poetic universe of Raymond Roussel and his significance in artistic modernism.

In a lecture entitled René Daniëls revisited, the art critic Dominic van den Boogerd discusses some of the recurring themes found in Daniëls' oeuvre: his fascination for the picture as a "fleece" and for painting as a play of appearances and disappearances.

This conversation serves as an introduction to the largest retrospective to be held to date on the Italian artist. alighiero boetti. game plan is co-produced by Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York) and the Museo, and is curated by Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey and Christian Rattemeyer.

Once again the Conference on Computer and Electronic Music offers a series of workshops on sound production and post-production, concerts dedicated to the aural perception of space and to live improvisation and sound projection, as well as a series of reflections, in a conversation and round table, about the artistic possibilities of radio and a fresh look at the Museum Collection from a new perspective, the auditory sphere.

There is no possible separation between art and life with Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1928). She was an active member in the critical art scene during the Vietnam War in the 1960s in New York, where she was also connected to minimalism, happenings and pop art. In 1973, she returned to Japan, extending the boundaries of her work. Her heterogeneous production ranges from collage to musical compositions, design, novels and installation art. Kusama obsessively develops the idea of repetition and screentone, covering surfaces with polka dots, creating what she calls ‘infinity nets’, one of her trademarks.

Encounters is a programme with which the Museo looks to generate debate on its scheduled exhibitions. Temporarily coinciding with the public opening of the exhibitions, a dialogue is initiated between artists, curators, critics and historians in order to look ahead to and question the lines and set-up of each exhibition project.

The artistic team PSJM, a duo formed by Cynthia Viera and Pablo San José based in Berlin, presents La Isla de Hidrógeno, a book in which a well-structured bunch of solid characters comes together in different organically related stories. The authors of the book will be joined by Miguel Cereceda, José Luis Corazón and Jesús Carrillo.

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 gathering of writers and publishers is an opportunity to look at the forms of minor literature, from spaces such as Quebec, Montreal or Tangiers. Sonia García Soubriet, Jesús Egido and Madeleine Monette dialogue about landscapes of seduction and about literature as a universe of noise and silence, urban labyrinths and private refuges.

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.

Jorge Ribalta, curator of the exhibition The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939, exercises a first attempt in this presentation of the historical documentation of the worker photography movement. Beyond formulating an examination of artists and unique works, his aim is to recount the constitution of public spaces through the medium of photography.

In his book Expresionismo. El lenguaje y construcción de la forma arquitectónica, Javier Climent argues that there is another history behind functionalism, one that reflects the legacy of the Expressionist tradition in Modernism. The book shows the less uniform side of functionalism, in which expressionism and organicism blend with rationalism.

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.

This book, edited by Fernando Estévez González and Mariano de Santa Ana, seeks to broaden the debate regarding archives, taking it beyond its usual reduction to such technical and operational aspects. Derived from two seminars, this publication offers a space for critical reflection, starting with different epistemological presuppositions and theoretical orientations.

Co-occurring with the public opening of the exhibition Desire Rises from Collapse, an encounter is presented between Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby and Ana Longoni, art historian and curator of the exhibition. The conversation looks ahead to and questions the lines and set-up of the exhibition project.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a conversation will take place between the artist Dorit Margreiter, Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Lynne Cooke, the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of the Museo.

The first Spanish-language publication of Atlas Mnemosyne, a decisive work in art historiography and the source of important trends in methodology, from Panofsky's iconology to the modern discipline of Visual Studies, serve as the framework for this debate on its author, Aby Warburg.

El sistema del arte en España contributes to a better understanding of how the Spanish context has entered the international art system. It also contributes to forging intellectual paradigms that help describe the functioning of the new art systems appearing in other, emerging countries.

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.

Georges Didi-Huberman, the curator of the exhibition Atlas. How to carry the world on one's back?, introduces the implications of narrating history based upon the "survival" of images and how the anachronism is integrated into the exhibition of art, using analysis of and references to the ideas of Aby Warburg. 

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 conference and screening explores the changes taking place in social formations and their contexts, revolving around the work of artist Yael Bartana (Israel, 1970). His work sheds light on the various forms of new communities and redefinitions of the idea of belonging.