Seminars and Lectures

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.

The Limits of Cinema is a series of screenings, meetings and debates designed to provide a space to reflect on the nature of the cinema, its boundaries and its interactions with other forms of expression.

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. 

A concert and screening by C. Raman Schlemmer via the work undertaken by Oskar Schlemmer as the director of the Bauhaus performing arts workshop. The Bauhaus dances engage in an intimate dialogue with the spatial ideas of Walter Gropius and the experiments of Kandinsky, Klee and Itten on colour and form.

On the occasion of the exhibition Val del Omar: overflow Lagartija Nick puts into practice the thesis of diaphonic sounds and the overflow of images in a concert in which noise and trance are reminiscent of the mystic and technological fantasies of the author of  Fuego en Castilla.

This show by Israel Galván, with a script by Pedro G. Romero, is a singular piece that reviews the choreographies and original pieces of the period, thereby returning sounds and oral memory to the Collection.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Bruce Conner (Kansas, 1933-San Francisco, 2008) worked in nearly every medium of the fine arts.

Suzanne Lacy (California, 1945), an American visual artist, is a pioneer in using political activism to denounce violence against women. Her early works prefigure many of the themes found in current debates on contextual and community practices, defending the role of an engaged public and the active role of the artist in the design of public policies.

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.

The work of Cecilia Barriga (Concepción, 1957), a Chilean filmmaker residing in Madrid since 1977, maintains a keen commitment to questions of social equality and reflections on gender, questioning the way in which our individual and group identities are constructed and represented, whether through the image impulse of what is most intimate or through the changing cultural and political circumstances that surround us.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents four premieres of films that have not been screened in Spain despite their formal and discursive value and the international recognition they have received.

This encounter looks at the research that stems from the exhibition : VAL DEL OMAR Overflow. Eugeni Bonet, curator of the exhibition, and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, assistant curator, present the results of work linked to the exhibit that is based on the attempts to reconstruct non-existent techniques and the recovery of unreleased work by the film-maker from Granada.

To mark the occasion of the exhibition Miralda. De gustibus non disputandum (24 June -11 October 2010), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is presenting three video programmes by the artist Antoni Miralda (Tarrasa, 1942) that explain his view of art in the context of the exhibition.

Jenny Marketou (Athens, 1954) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work clamours for public participation at the same time that it questions the systems that structure how we live with respect to the limits of public space and our freedom.

This presentation explores some of the themes addressed in the last issue of Archivos de la Filmoteca, a periodical published by the Generalitat Valenciana Film Institute. The aim of this publication is to examine Guernica in the light of visual culture studies and their relationship with cinema and photography as mass communication media.

The Storyteller presents a group of international artists who use stories as a way to understand and convey political and social events. All of the works in The Storyteller revolve around situations that are either in the process of unfolding or that continue to impact the lives of the artists or protagonists.

Ines Doujak's performance Eviva Il Cotello (Lang lebe das Messer) intervenes the exhitibion space and discoursive realm of the The Potosí Principle. How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land? In her work, Ines Doujak examines the norms of human behaviour as structural and constituent elements of society from a decidedly feminist perspective.

Drift is Ours is a workshop of experience, reflection and debate from the perspective of pedagogy and modern utopia based in Latin America, linked to the exhibition project Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, Journeys and Morphologies. The event will consist in three workshops led by activists, architects, geographers, poets and town planners.

This series of conferences and screenings analyse, from the 1970s onwards, the creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces, particularly in the Lower Manhattan area of New York. The debates delve deeper into photographic projects and performances, along with screenings of films and videos, to reveal a version of the city that greatly differs from the official one.

During the 1970s, a time of intensive de-industrialisation and the transition to an information economy in New York, artists found new ways to use the city. The creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces intensified, especially in Lower Manhattan, which was becoming a centre of the commercial art world. Action Behind the Margins combines debates, performances pieces and film screenings to reveal a city where public and private spheres intermingle and marginal subjects assert their right to the city.

Abigail Child (San Francisco, 1948) explores the possibilities inherent in mixing genres and narrative strategies to engage public space through memory and history.

Since the 1950s, Spain has been home to an important tradition of experimental film cut off from conventional exhibition spaces. This series was designed to give this unknown branch of film the visibility it deserves. From more than a thousand films, forty-three were chosen to be screened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in six sessions. In order to spark a dialogue between the different eras, this vastly diverse group of seminal films was shown out of chronological order, blazing a trail through the almost unknown history of Spanish cinema.

Pedro Garhel (Tenerife, 1952-2005), a multifaceted and multidisciplinary artist, was a pioneer in the field of electronic and interactive art in Spain. He began his work in the area of performance and video art in Madrid, where in 1981 he founded the emblematic Espacio P, a multi-purpose centre managed by the artists themselves that became a meeting point between the sound, visual and performing arts.

The title Reacción en cadena applies to a selection of videos from the Cal Cego Contemporary Art Collection (Barcelona) that create genealogies of artists, works and discourses. Viewing the videos reveals the relationships, associations, counterpositions, superpositions, revisions and conflicts generated between them.

Since its first edition, Eurojazz orients its line up towards musicians within the sphere of continental Europe. The festival’s poster design looks to connect the jazz genre with European cultural identity. In this edition the Museo presents concerts by Rita Marcoully, Tingvall Trio, Terje Rypdal, Posé-Salvador-Roper Trío and Louis Sclavis Quintet.

Transitland: video art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009 is a project put together to mark the occasion of the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It includes a selection of one hundred works produced between 1989 and 2009 that reflect the political, social and personal transformations that occurred in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.

Shirin Neshat (Iran, 1957) is a visual artist based in the United States whose works explore the image of women in Islamic society. She first gained recognition on an international level after the publication of her portraits included in the series Women of Allah (1993-1997) and then became more widely known in 1999 when she received the International Prize at the Venice Biennale for her video installations Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999).

LAX (the code for the Los Angeles international airport) is a project conceived of and produced by the Museo Reina Sofía Audiovisual Department coinciding with ARCO10, which hosted Los Angeles as a guest city. The project is divided into three sections: L.A. Films, Video Art in Los Angeles (1970-1984) and, for the first time in Spain, a retrospective on the underground California filmmaker Kenneth Anger (Santa Monica, 1927).

Leandro Katz’ work (Buenos Aires, 1938) grapples with the passage of time and the construction of memory through the politics of perception made possible by audiovisual media. Two films, El día que me quieras (1997) and Exhumación (2007), explore the icon Che Guevara from the image of the leader’s lifeless body and later story of his death.

Film at the Pamplona Encounters is a series of screenings and debates organised on the occasion of Encuentros de Pamplona 72. Fin de fiesta del arte experimental (The Pamplona Encounters 1972. End of the Party for Experimental Art), held at the Museo Reina Sofía (28 October 2009 - 22 February 2010). According to Vicente J. Benet, the Encounters “offered an overview of audiovisual media characterised by a hybridisation that may seem somewhat baffling today. The array of options for the viewers ranged from the most heterodox trends in the new video media of the time to vestiges of the earliest films, slices of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, recent experimental films, examples of professional-quality films with ties to modern writing and independent films”.