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The work and thinking of Luis Camnitzer (Lübeck, Germany, 1937) is anchored in a comprehensive ethical awareness, which for this US-based Uruguayan artist gives meaning to artistic creation in his social context.

In his 1987 essay “Access to the Mainstream”, Camnitzer writes: “We’re primarily ethical beings who can tell right from wrong, fair from unfair, not only as individuals but in community contexts (…) Art becomes the instrument of choice for implementing these strategies.”  

This interview looks over Camnitzer’s main ideas of Conceptualism, going back to the radicalism of his early work with the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW) collective – grounded in ephemeral, word-based works – and elicits general reflections on his artistic mediums and the concepts of ethics and education that are patently linked to his creative activity. A special section is devoted to the idea of violence and a key work, Puerto Montt Massacre (1969), which belongs to the Museo’s Collection. In the work, Camnitzer approaches political content through signs, words and geometry, placing the spectator inside the work so that, rather than passively consuming it, they are forced to experiment in the “field of knowledge”. 

Lotty Rosenfeld, a visual artist and founder of the group C.A.D.A. (Art Actions Collective), along with artist Juan Castillo, sociologist Fernando Balcells, poet Raúl Zurita and novelist Diamela Eltit, discusses the group’s origins and its development during the years of Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Its works were based on the reformulation of the mechanisms of artistic production and framed inside counter-institutional practice, while the use of direct action in public space as a tool for redefining the conditions of its creative participation defined the group and the individual work of some of its members. Emblematic works such as Para no morir de hambre en el arte (Not to Die of Hunger in Art, 1979) and No + (No More, 1983–1989) went beyond the artistic sphere, coming to form part of the collective imaginary in Latin America. Rosenfeld also analyses the notion of archive and her solo work, both individually and as part of feminist groups in Chile.

Lucy Lippard (1937) is one of the foremost critics and creators in the conception and history of contemporary art. Her writing, exhibitions and biography have been the subject of far-reaching studies and shows, for instance the recent Materializing “Six Years”: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of the Conceptual Art (Brooklyn Art Museum, 2012–2013) and From Conceptualism to Feminism. Lucy Lippard’s Numbers Shows 1969–74 (Afterall, 2012). Lippard was a guest at the opening of the Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, which explores different approaches to art history – understanding it as a constantly evolving discourse – and signalled the start of activities in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Centre. Therefore, on the occasion of her visit, a master lecture, workshop and interview were all conducted, the latter of which looked over, for the first time, her career as a whole, for example the landmark exhibition Eccentric Abstraction (1966), representing a feminist and organic critique of Minimalism, a key term in the “dematerialisation of art” (1972), or the displacement of the institutional systems of art by community- and territorial-based aesthetic practices.

The Poetics of Democracy: Images and Counter-Images from the Spanish Transition originates from research undertaken in 2008 by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Collections, the objective being to vindicate the artistic experiences excluded from the institutional discourses of the history of Spanish art of the 1970s. In this video, Manuel Borja-Villel (director of the Museum) and Rosario Peiró (Head of Collections) explain this research process —which was carried out over a decade— to recall a period when, alongside civil demands for democratic liberties, social justice, and self-government, there arose a new aesthetic linked to innovative cultural practices that sought to subvert the order of Franco’s regime and the institutional schemes attempting to inherit it.

This show explores the contribution of foreign artists who, after the Second World War, were working in Paris, a city which still preserved a certain aura surrounding its mythical modern embodiment as a “City of Light” in the 19th century. The broad collective exhibition reflects the vitality and vivacity of the art scene in all its complexity, displaying the different creative trends which took hold in the city inside and outside the School of Paris at a time of fervent political debate, held to the backdrop of the new global stage opened by the Cold War. From a broad array of artistic fields — from painting and sculpture to jazz, literature and film — foreign artists dealt with mounting tension by bringing their approaches and hopes to the Parisian milieu in an attempt to connect with the tradition of international modernism but without losing a grip on their own cultural identity.

Throughout his career as a sculptor, Jaume Plensa (Barcelona, 1955), who has received the the prestigious Velázquez Award for the Arts in 2013, has drawn on spirituality, the body and collective memory as the primary sources which tie together his visual artwork. Literature, psychology, biology, language and history become strategic tools in the creation of his work, and, through a broad spectrum of materials — steel, cast iron, resin, glass, water, sound — Plensa lends weight and physical volume to the components of the human condition and the ephemeral. In this instance, the invisible forms the essence of his intervention in the Palacio de Cristal: a group of steel mesh sculptures which take the space to draw the incomplete faces of figures hanging in the air, intersected by light and suspended in time.

In its second edition, Archipelago asserts its approach to listening as a form of both knowledge and aesthetic pleasure. Attendants are encouraged to approach the complexities of the cotemporary world not only through the ear, but also through the body, by absorbing sound with all their organs and bones.

Participants: Janneke van der Putten, Agnès Pe, Hashigakari, Tutu, Clara de Asís, Cedrick Fermont, Toukadime, Sofyann Ben, Youssef (Ammar 808), Áine O’Dwyer, Tarawangsawelas + Rabih Beaini, Nadah El Shazly, Errorsmith and Dj Lag.

This video assembles a series of interviews, carried out in conjunction with the presentation of León Ferrari's literary collage The Words of Others, which explore the Argentinean artist's approaches to his work and the challenges and research entailed in staging this theatre piece in the Museo Reina Sofía.

Participants:
Ruth Estévez. Independent researcher. In charge of direction and mise en scène.
Ana Longoni. Director of Public Activities, Museo Reina Sofía.
Javier del Olmo. Representative of the León Ferrari Foundation.
José Antonio Sánchez. Researcher. In charge of dramaturgy and mise en scène.
Isabel de Naverán. Dance advisor, Museo Reina Sofía.

This retrospective offers a global, contextualised view of the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer’s multi-faceted work, spanning nearly sixty years. As an essayist, art critic, curator, teacher, lecturer and a creator of objects, actions and musical compositions, Camnitzer focuses on art’s transformative capacity, viewing it essentially as a product of reflection. His practice, whether it be artistic, or through his essays or teaching, is defined by its approach to the controversial issues of our times: the criticism of art-commodity, the demystification and obsolescence of the role of the artist in consumer society, or the capacity of neoliberal societies to turn education into an instrument of propaganda.

This exhibition collects Tanning's extensive, exhaustive and expressive body of work between the USA and France, producing paintings, drawings, costume and set designs for ballets, “soft” sculptures, novels and poems. The exhibition revolves around themed rooms drifting through the periods which were integral to Tanning’s career — spanning childhood and family scenes, girls dressed in Victorian clothing, baroque and bucolic nudes, red-rock deserts, and representations of flowers, highly pertinent in her mature work. Moreover, her installations include Chambre 202, Hôtel du Pavot [Poppy Hotel, Room 202] (1970–1973), with amorphous sculptures inviting visitors to see, feel and be part of the surreal world she inhabits.

The collective of photographers which operated under the name AFAL Group hailed from the publication AFAL, a magazine specialised in film and photography, published over a six-year period, from 1956 to 1963, and coordinated from Almería by José María Artero García (Almería, 1928–1991) and Carlos Pérez Siquier (Almería, 1930). Its independent approach and fresh tone soon attracted inquiring photographers from all over Spain, thus turning the magazine into a force driving behind the renewal of post-war Spanish photography.

In this interview, Dora García (Valladolid, Spain, 1965) draws from different works in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection to reflect on her work from its starting point, with themes such as narrative, infinite writing, performance and psychoanalysis shaping a coherent and continuous world. The artist analyses her use of the book as an object and repository of stories, and, by way of literary and psychoanalytical references, from James Joyce and Freud to Lacan, she discusses the transformation of reading and text production into collective actions. Similarly, she explores the key strands running through debates on performance: how to document and transmit it and questioning the classical idea of impossibility associated with its repetition, present in her approach to the works and writings of Allan Kaprow and Óscar Masotta. She also focuses on the damned artist, the notion of the anti-hero and the inappropriate to define a way of approaching reality through fiction.

This exhibition explores Russian avant-garde art through the perspective of the Anti-art canons associated with the international Dada movement. The anti-academic work of Kazimir Malevich to eclipse classical art and the transrational language experiments (zaum) of Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh are just some of the early contributions which substantiate the reasoning behind this show.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents a retrospective on Eusebio Sempere (Onil, Alicante, 1923–1985), one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century Spanish art who shared the platforms and ideas of Kinetic Art and whose work was set apart through its light- and colour-based poetics.

The exhibition brings together around 170 pieces, including watercolours, gouaches, luminous reliefs, collages, paintings, mobiles, sculptures and interdisciplinary projects, in addition to a documentary section on the period stretching from 1949 to the early 1980s. 

How do we explain a time of excessive and overwhelming information overload? Film-maker Adam Curtis proposes narration as a mechanism for unravelling the present, his documentaries connecting occurrences, people, events and ideas randomly and temporarily, shaping a tightly packed network of connections which explain and confront, in a way few cultural productions do, contemporary reality. How can we add images to this narration? Or, similarly, through film how can we represent the way in which power operates? In this interview, conducted exclusively by Soy Cámara online (CCCB’s video essay channel), and in conjunction with the retrospective on the film-maker in the Museo Reina Sofía, Curtis reflects on these questions and his own concept of film.

Archipelago is a new series of concerts that views listening at once as a form of knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment. In this, the first edition, Archipelago is enveloped in drone and minimalist music, exploring its influences and unexpected offshoots.

In this session, Emmanuel Holterbach performs the full version of Trilogy on Death, by the French composer Éliane Radigue. Agnès Pe, a self-taught and multidisciplinary musicologist and researcher, performs her own interpretation of the concept of Archipelago, approaching a musical theme via different styles and places.

Archipelago is a new series of concerts that views listening at once as a form of knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment. In this, the first edition, Archipelago is enveloped in drone and minimalist music, exploring its influences and unexpected offshoots.

The programme welcomes the Japanese musician and artist Yoshi Wada, linked to Fluxus, and his son Tashi Wada, who works with experimental music, art and interdisciplinary performance. They perform in this session a specific piece with the collaboration of the percussionist Ingar Zach and the Banda de Gaitas Lume of Biqueira.
To complete the session, Damián Schwartz, producer, DJ and artist based in Madrid explores the edgier side of dance music, relating figures such as Jamal Moss and his more experimental strands to composers such as Terry Riley and Robert Ashley.

Archipelago is a new series of concerts that views listening at once as a form of knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment. In this, the first edition, Archipelago is enveloped in drone and minimalist music, exploring its influences and unexpected offshoots.

This session presents Severine Beata, name chosen by Marta Peláez for a new sound project, who performs some of these new tracks alongside Javi Álvarez (Fluzo, Dúo Cobra, Néboa, Dj de la muerte, La Follable, etc.), producer of the record presented on this occasion; and the band iNSANLAR (literally meaning “humanity” in Turkish but with more profound and esoteric connotations), whose album Kime Ne, gained international admiration, catching the ear of the listener with its idiosyncratic blend of traditional Anatolian-Mesopotamian instrumentation, electronic music and spiritual and philosophical lyrics.

Dedicated to the artist Dora García (Valladolid, 1965), this exhibition embarking on an open journey around a broad array of her works in diverse formats and mediums — film, performance, texts, drawings — and punctuating some of the constants running through her career. The title, Second Time Around, originates from Julio Cortázar’s homonymous story, written in 1974, which recounts the climate of psychosis and uncertainty caused by the trauma of disappearances in Argentina. Second Time is also the name of García’s most recent project, which orbits the figure of Oscar Masotta, a contemporary of Cortázar’s and a pivotal theorist in the Argentinian avant-garde from the 1950s to the 1970s.

The exhibition is accompanied by a specific programme of performances by the artist.

The work of Beatriz González (Bucaramanga, 1938), widely regarded as one of the seminal artists from the Colombian art scene, occupies a unique place in the history of Latin American art — not only is she a pioneer of Pop Art, but also, almost without calculation, an incisive and coherent chronicler of recent Colombian history. Setting out from the anonymous quote “art relates what history cannot” — used frequently by the artist — her work orbits around memory; memory not as a pretext for nostalgia, but, on the other end of the scale, something tightly bound to the present. González draws inspiration from the mass media, engaging in dialogue with popular narratives and formal painting, or appropriating press photographs, reinterpreting them through drawing, painting, graphic art and sculpture.

The exhibition Pessoa. All Art Is a Form of Literature takes its title from a quote by Álvaro de Campos, one of the most avant-garde heteronyms created by Fernando Pessoa (Lisbon, 1888–1935), and published in the influential Portuguese magazine presença.

Paulism, Intersectionism, Sensacionism are just some of the terms coined by the poet in his scores of texts, and underpin the idiosyncrasies of Portuguese modernity. This exhibition, therefore, draws on these isms to put in place a visual account of the Portuguese scene, bringing together a selection of works by figures such as José de Almada Negreiros, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, Eduardo Viana, Sarah Affonso and Júlio, among others, to focus on the first aesthetic currents in Portugal from the turn of the 20th century to 1935.

The union of the Telefónica Cubist Collection and the cubist holdings at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia supports this plural conception of the cubist experience. The union of the two collections also brings the work of Juan Gris to the fore in both the exhibition and the narrative. Thinking about the cubist experience inevitably means thinking about the pervasiveness of the work of Picasso and Braque. But at this point in time, it is not only legitimate and possible to reconsider the cubist experience from the perspective of the formulations of Juan Gris, it is also desirable, because it means recognising the complexity of the true nature of Cubism.

Rosa Barba (Agrigento, Italy, 1972) uses the medium of the cinema, from its devices and materiality to the temporalities it summons up, to explore the mechanisms that articulate our era, when any possibility of rupture can stem only from the recognition of a society where the difference between productive work and creativity is non-existent, and where our dependence on technology and gadgets is almost absolute. Through misadjustments, paradoxes and displacements, the artist reveals the composition of narratives and the apparatuses which make them possible. Her films and installations destabilize grand narratives and propose other perceptions of the real where framing and ciphering technologies –­that is, apparatuses– are revealed as an essential part of the organization of our subjectivities, emotions and experiences.

The exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough focuses on his stage work, including theatre, opera and performance, and takes this perspective to approach his sculptural projects.

William Kentridge, artist, Soledad Liaño, curator and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about the exhibition.

Esther Ferrer, artist and Laurence Rassel, co-curator talk about the exhibition devoted to the work of a pioneer and one of the foremost representatives of performance art in Spain

Soledad Lorenzo, Salvador Nadales y Manuel Borja-Villel, talk about this exhibition that sets forth a broad selection of works comprising the temporary loan made by the gallerist Soledad Lorenzo to the Museo Reina Sofía in 2014.

Meeting Point, deals with concepts of space and geometry from different optics. With its point of departure set through two artists which are at the core of the Soledad Lorenzo Collection — Pablo Palazuelo and Antoni Tàpies — this survey spans in different formats by eminent artists with ties to the gallerist’s career, for instance Soledad Sevilla, Ángeles Marcos and the so-called Basque Group (Txomin Badiola, Peio Irazu, Sergio Prego and Jon Mikel Euba).

Brian Walker, co-curator of the exhibition and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about George Herriman's show.

The work of Herriman came into being alongside the progress of the comic as a new artistic language surfacing in the USA at the tail end of the nineteenth century. This new medium brought with it a series of visual discoveries based on the repetition of drawings and patterns which, at this early stage, denoted a major narrative accomplishment. His most popular creation, the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944), lauded by The Comics Journal as the century’s finest comic creation.

Doris Salcedo and Manuel Borja-Villel, talk about the exhibition at Palacio de Cristal. The work of Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958) is deeply rooted in the social and political circumstances of her native Colombia, although she does occasionally address problems in other contexts — a case in point being the project she has devised for the Palacio de Cristal. Time and again, her work sets out from rigorous research as she employs sculpture and installation to approach situations of conflict, with violence and its victims, memory and forgetting ever-present. Salcedo’s use of everyday materials and personal objects often takes on a sinister quality to evoke the absence of those people they are related to, or those to which they belong: missing persons, refugees, people who have been murdered or forgotten… Her pieces — poetic, fragile, beautiful — encompass drama, trauma and violence, often working as remembrance or homage, mourning for the living and, above all, people who die forgotten.

Throughout her career as a performer and composer, Joan La Barbara, a hugely influential figure in the sphere of contemporary experimental music, has explored the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument, developing a true and signature vocabulary of experimental techniques. She uses these techniques to explore the potential range of timbres in a single pitch, circular breathing inspired by French horn playing, and multiphonics, in addition to recovering classics such as choral singing.