Activities

In Freedom Park, a squatter settlement in South Africa, a group of HIV-infected women created a network called Tapologo. Working with nurses from their community, they transformed misery and degradation into resistance and hope. Catholic bishop Kevin Dowling helped them, raising doubts about the sexual and moral doctrine of the Church in this context.

The camera never stops moving while it follows the operation of emptying the Huerta de San Vicente of all of its contents - paintings, furniture, rugs, flowerpots, knickknacks, a piano - leaving it clean and bare, and accompanying the objects wrapped in semi-transparent plastic to a storage site where they are placed in a pile.

Constanze Ruhm (Vienna, 1965) is an artist and filmmaker whose work looks at the relationship between film and the new media from the viewpoint of the ideas of feminist film theory, representation and identity. The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents, for the first time in Spain, her film X Love Scenes (2007), the fifth in the X Characters series, which she began in 2001.

Since the 1970s, Marcel Odenbach (Cologne, 1953) has had a decisive influence on the development of video, using the qualities and possibilities offered by the medium to make political and social statements. “From the very start of my career as a video artist, I took the recording of moving pictures for granted,” says Odenbach.

Presented by the psychoanalyst and philosopher Slavoj iek (Ljubljana, 1949) and directed by Sophie Fiennes (Suffolk, 1967), The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) follows the philosopher as he examines films like The Exorcist (1973), Duck Soup (1933) and Alien (1979), speaking from replica sets of classic films like Psycho (1960), Blue Velvet (1986) and The Matrix (1999).