Activities

This film series presents a panoramic view of recent independent film from Latin America, while also introducing a new screening area in the Museo – the transformation of the outdoor terraces into a new open-air cinema. Scene Games offers an interpretation of the latest films from Latin American cinema, barely seen in Europe, where theatricality is the key element in approaching reality.

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.

The Limitless Place is the first collaboration between Museo Reina Sofía and the Centro Dramático Nacional (National Drama Centre) and Teatro Pradillo, with the latter conducting a programme of performances, lectures and encounters. It comes about from the desire to question the forms and language of the stage with the will to think about the theatre we actually want; what is, in short, the world we strive to build our society upon.

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.

A debate runs through a whole century of images of bodies in movement: that which refers to the correspondence between these bodies in live performance (on stage, in the gallery or museum) and in film. Through this question, the aim is to elucidate whether the audiovisual record of practices in which the body is at the centre – contemporary dance and artistic performance – “faithfully” reflects its apparent inherent truth.

In collaboration with FILMADRID, a new space devoted to contemporary auteur cinema, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española (the Spanish Film Institute) welcome the retrospective Lav Diaz. The Evolution of a Filipino Film-maker, centred upon a contemporary director whose experiments with duration best represent the popular and tragic history of a community.

Resonance is a series of sound interventions for a specific site, activating the acoustic and historical space in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Sabatini Building. The programme refrains from using the auditorium and electronic amplification, which means guest artists, musicians and composers will present a series of pieces that set in motion alternative contexts for sound and contemporary music.

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.

To mark International Dance Day, the Museo calls on all those interested in taking part, for 10 minutes, in the reinterpretation of one of the most emblematic pieces in the history of contemporary dance: Rosas danst Rosas.

Once again, the Museo joins in with the activities held to mark International Dance Day, to take place on Wednesday 29 April, with a view to giving an artistic practice that is becoming increasingly more prominent in the Museo’s Collection and activities visibility and integrate it into its spaces.

Intervalos is a film programme showing contemporary audiovisual works, Museo's own productions and works that, between the performative and the cinematic, show the new directions of the moving image. This new edition of Intervalos presents Letters to Max, the latest film by Eric Baudelaire

After organising activities with Merce Cunningham and Simone Forti, the Museo presents the choreographer and dancer Steve Paxton (USA, 1939), a central figure in the development of contemporary dance and the creator of contact improvisation. On this occasion Bound, a solo devised by Paxton, will be performed, for the first time in Spain, by the dancer Jurij Konjar, who will also hold a workshop.

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.

This series explores how the museum has been conceived, represented and questioned in different film poetics. Filming the museum institution entails not only a discussion on how art is exhibited and its mechanism of interpretation, but also how other past times in the present are inserted and reactivated, articulating an amalgamation of transience, inside and outside the present, that is specific to the museum and its narrations.

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.

Eclectic, poppy, sophisticated, the music of Arto Lindsay evokes reverse trajectories and unexpected influences. Educated in Brazil during the emergence of Tropicália in the 1970s, Lindsay added the references and characteristics of this broad cultural movement in Brazil, focused on diluting art in a multifarious and impalpable experience, to the No Wave scene in the USA.

Specters: A Ciné-politics of Haunting gathers a selection of recent international film and video that conjures the hauntings of our collective cultural imaginary. Some phantoms arise from past injustices and political traumas, some apparitions, of catastrophic times to come.

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.

This film season continues a series of programmes that have addressed the change to structures, narrations and methods of film-making in recent Spanish cinema. With three editions to date, The Memory of Disrepute develops, through double sessions, how other cinema invents its own genealogy, exercising a discontinuous and partisan history of recent cinema.

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.

Short Dance Films is a touring programme that includes a selection of forty-five short dance films produced in Europe in recent years. It is curated by Núria Font/NU2’s, commissioned by the European Dancehouse Network, a network with the participation of 20 dance houses from 16 countries.

This programme presents pop confronting pop, recognising the seduction of consumer culture whilst also keeping it at a critical distance. In relation to the exhibition devoted to Richard Hamilton, this series approaches the popular as subversion and as an investigation into the characteristics of a new society that emerged between the 1950s and 1970s.

Performing Gender is a European project that takes a critical look at the politics of gender and sexuality using dance and performance tools. Bodies and their multiple gender inscriptions are the subject of exploration and experimentation by a group of artists that, over the course of one year, have carried out their research by touring around different European institutions.

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film, with their work condensing a complex palimpsest of voices that, found between nascent politics of representation, put forward a language of diaspora.

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.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.