Exhibition. Territories and Fictions. Thinking a New Way of the World

João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Maça de Darwin, macaco de Newton, 2012

This presentation of holdings from the Museo Reina Sofía Collection, largely made up of recent acquisitions, approaches the languages and artistic practices that defined the period between the end of the 1990s and 2007 – both in Spain and internationally - by way of a series of shared questions that heralded the start of the century and run up to the present time.

The way in which artists tackled the effects of globalisation and new geopolitical configurations marks the starting point of this exhibition via works by Zoe Leonard and Allan Sekula. Another line of research is concerned with the examination of languages of modernity and their ties to colonial processes; therefore, works by Leonor Antunes, Ines Doujak and Adrià Julià appropriate images and historical accounts in order to carry out a critical reading of them. Moreover, the Nation-State crisis and theatrical strategies throughout history are put forward in this show in the form of “political fictions” through artists such as Ibon Aranberri and Peter Friedl. In a closer setting, there are also case studies related to processes of transformation in the industrial outskirts of Barcelona and gentrification in cities such as Madrid, present in projects by María Ruido, Patrick Faigenbaum and Manolo Laguillo, among others.

Date: until March 13, 2017
Location: Sabatini Building, Floor 3
Curatorship: Manuel Borja-Villel, Cristina Cámara, Beatriz Herráez, Lola Hinojosa and Rosario Peiró
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía. Collections Department

Exhibition. Lothar Baumgarten. The ship is going under, the ice is breaking through

Lothar Baumgarten. Photography. The ship is going under, the ice is breaking through, 2001

Lothar Baumgarten, who has worked on and off with soundscapes for four decades, concentrates here on the fragility of the domed glass structure of the Palacio de Cristal to create a sound sculpture from a series of audio recordings of ice thawing on the banks of the Hudson River in upstate New York, which he registered in the years 2001 to 2005.

Through meticulous spatial and sequential editing and montage, he manages to produce the spectacular illusion of the apparent cracking and blasting of the glass structure above. Within the transparent architectural presence of its glass corpus, the deafening sound of the ice becomes a tonal analogy for the crashing stocks and assets of the insatiable “shark trading” of financial markets; it concerns greedy speculation about unlimited economic growth and the resulting impact on the dramatically changing global climate.

Date: from November 3, 2016 to April 16, 2017
Location: Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía

Film series. Muntadas and Reese. Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016

Muntadas & Reese. Political Advertisement IX: 1952-2016, 2016. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York

Within the framework of the programme Intervalos, Museo Reina Sofía screens Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016, an audiovisual project by artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, to be shown in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections. The film spans six decades of the relationship between rhetoric in democracy and advertising techniques by virtue of a montage compiling a broad archive of campaign ads for TV, stretching from their emergence in the 1952 Eisenhower-Stevenson election to the present 2016 campaign between Clinton and Trump.

Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016 will be shown in parallel across a number of art centres in the United States and Europe. In Madrid two sessions have been scheduled: the first with an intervention by film historian Román Gubern, and the second with journalist Andrea Aguilar, who has been involved in the media coverage of recent U.S. election campaigns.

Date: November 5 and 6, 2016
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Location: Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Admission: Free until full capacity is reached
Programme: Check website
Organised by: Museo Reina Sofía