Activities

Putting ourselves in the present and placing this present inside the politics of temporality (taking up the idea of Mario Rufer) cannot be conceived outside the coloniality of power theory, formulated by Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018).

Alyce Mahon, curator of the exhibition Dorothea Tanning. Behind the Door, Another Invisible Door (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2018 – 7 January 2019), will conduct a pre-opening guided tour of this retrospective, which explores the seventy-year-long career of the American artist. 

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.

Since 2000, certain universities, chiefly in the English-speaking world, have developed multidisciplinary studies, which include visual studies and others with the generic title Sound Studies. Initially, the specialised historiography in this field analysed the presence of sound and music in the arts, before focusing on vibrational force, broadening its field of analysis to literature, painting and, naturally, music.

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.