Activities

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.

On this occasion, dance leaves the conventional setting of a stage to become an integral part of the exhibition space. In this activity, young CND choreographers make a series of proposals that work with the concepts of manipulation and the search for the unknown.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that show the various facets of contemporary musical creation. After the editions of 2011, in which musicians such as Peter Broderick, Bugge Wesseltoft, Cibelle, Oy, Mastretta and Lonely Drifter Karen, took part, Museo Reina Sofía once again lends its support to music, with an eclectic sample of proposals that attempt to draw a map of the array of trends making up today's diverse musical scene.

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.

The presence of film in the successive re-readings of Museo Reina Sofía Collection alludes to the crisis in the distinction between hierarchies and artistic narrations, but it also points to the idea that a collection involves a network of stories, memories and times that are inseparable from film practice.

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.

Gonzalo de Olavide in memoriam (1934-2005)
The prestigious director Arturo Tamayo is conducting a study and a recovery of the work of the Madrid-born composer Gonzalo de Olavide (1934-2005), and the result will be the recording of the musician's entire body of orchestral music for the label Verso.

Sound situation: Aural Drift is a program of activities focusing on the connection between sound and drift, psychogeography and aurality, including the anthropological level and the analysis and discussion of the influence and repercussions of situationist concepts (drift, construction of situations anddétournement) in the area of sound production.

The piano-mezzo soprano duo formed by Antón Cardó and Elena Gragera has a special interest in the Spanish vocal repertoire of the 20th century, as shown by their recordings of a number of Robert Gerhard's songs for voice and piano.

All About Love, a title borrowed from the film of the same name made by Ann Hui (Anshan, 1947), sums up the subject matter of this Chinese filmmaker's work, which usually revolves around social and personal relationships and has a great deal of affective and emotional content.

For the eighth edition of the Festival Ellas Crean, vocalist Fátima Miranda has designed a specific programme entitled deCantar, which includes the work Albórolas, recently awarded first prize at the National Competition of Video Art by Female Artists from a Gender Perspective.

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.

How to give feminist film its own voice against the conventions of classic film and how to maintain the subaltern nature of this voice?

Jacobo Durán-Loriga (1958) takes on another of the commissions proposed by the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM), which will be performed by the Madrid-based group Modus Novus, directed by Santiago Serrate.

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 Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM) is committed to strengthening the Spanish repertory of string quartets, as one of the most important and richest channels of musical creation of recent years. To this end, it has commissioned a new piece by the master Antón García Abril, one of the most outstanding composers of his generation.

The CNDM has offered one of its 15 commissions to the Gijón-born composer Juan José Eslava (1970), who divides his time and career between Japan and Madrid.

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.

Reactivate/reinterpret brings together a varied group of specialists from different fields with the idea of analysing the place of performative practices within the realm of contemporary art museums. The series is comprised of various public lectures, workshops with the students of the Study Centre and two art interventions, by Jerôme Bel and Falke Pisano.

Founded in 2008, the young Granada-based group Neoars Sonora will be at the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM) to give the premier performance of two new works: Quasi una serenata by Jorge Fernández Guerra and Aleph, for voice, violin, cello and piano, by the Gerona-born composer Iluminada Pérez.

This performance, organised in connection with the exhibition Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel, is a unique opportunity to see the work of Guy de Cointet in the context for which it was conceived, somewhere between the theatre and the museum. Put on by the Dutch company If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, the two plays are the result of a long research process related to the complexity of re-staging.

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.

In this concert, Morton Subotnick is accompanied by the visual artist Lillevan, a frequent collaborator of musicians on the experimental music scene, who will offer a visual interpretation of Subotnick's music. The concert will feature pieces from Silver Apples Of The Moon (1967) and from another one of his pioneering albums, A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur (1978).

This series presents a number of videos and performances that have arisen out of contemporary feminist, queer/cuir and "transmarikabollo" (Spanish slang term for LGBT) practices situated within the tradition of guerrilla video: exercises in appropriation of lightweight mass media as counter-information media, but also as dissident gender and sexuality production techniques.

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.

Spoken Exhibition is an alternative history of Polish art since 1960, a history that tells about the creation of art institutions, the major exhibitions and the art gestures that have determined the specificity of a post-communist era. It is presented as a cross between performance art and narrative that is reinterpreted and reread in every new context in which it takes place.

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.