Interview with Andreas Huyssen March 2011 Structured around various core ideas, this interview with the author of the book Modernismo después de la postmodernidad (2011) shows the dilemmas arising between a revision of the melancholic and contemplative past, returned in the form of the architectural memorial, and a critical reading from the museum, in which history and memory are confronted. Huyssen discusses the foundations of a new modernism, which has future prospects and projects but lacks a geographical centre and power hierarchies. The Collection Centro de estudios
Roberto Jacoby and Ana Longoni on Desire rises from Collapse March 2011 Roberto Jacoby is an artist who, through his multiple abandonments of art, nourishes the artistic practice of possibility, moments of tension and new agents. His work begins in the realm of Instituto Di Tella and, in a series of radical episodes, becomes Tucumán Arde (1968). Far from ending there, his subsequent career has dealt with networks, memory and its activations (or obliterations) in the archive. Exhibitions
Efrén Álvarez. Económicos March 2011 Económicos, the exhibition by the artist Efrén Álvarez (Barcelona, 1980), outlines a global vision of today's economy as a discipline that caricaturizes itself. Forty drawings and texts by different authors show relationship systems in which the apparent pedagogical intention of the exhibition entails, in practice, looking at what is unproductive, decayed and alienated through work and consumption Exhibitions
Ricardo Piglia, on Roberto Jacoby February 2011 The novelist Ricardo Piglia talks about the work of the Argentine artist Roberto Jacoby, in connection with the exhibition Roberto Jacoby, Desire rises from Collapse (Museo Reina Sofía, 25 February to 30 May, 2011). Jacoby's work, explains Piglia, contributes to the formation of two of today's key ideas: the creation of networks, through what Jacoby calls technologies of friendship, and the notion of immateriality as a fundamental aspect of contemporary society. Exhibitions
Asier Mendizabal January 2011 In much of the work by Asier Mendizabal (Ordizia, 1973) history ceases to be a practice linked to the past and instead reveals the cracks through which it becomes an activity intimately connected to the present. In this interview he comments on some of his work, hermetic and complex, where the resource of narration becomes something that updates both history and its visual forms. The ideas of monument, public sculpture and photomontage are modern archetypes that Mendizabal uses as a possibility of that which is collective. Exhibitions
Miralda. De gustibus non disputandum June 2010 Re-opening the Palacio de Velázquez after more than five years, the Museo Reina Sofía's new exhibition venue presents the first comprehensive retrospective of the work of Antoni Miralda (Barcelona, 1942). Over more than four decades of production, the Catalan artist's work has been characterized by a continuous and ironic demystification of the art object, joined by an anthropological analysis of the systems of consumption and ritual and ethnological presentation of the codes that articulate contemporaneity. Exhibitions
Suzanne Lacy February 2010 Presentation last 18 February 2010 of The Tattooed Skeleton, title of the performance with which the U.S.-born artist Suzanne Lacy takes on, in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofía, the topic of domestic violence against women, on the occasion of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, 24th and 25th November 2010. Also involved in the presentation are María José Martín Bernabé, from the Government Delegation against Gender-based Violence; Ana María Pérez del Campo, from the Federation of Separated and Divorced Women; Covadonga Naredo and Esther Cerro, from the Federation of Progressive Women; and Sara Vicente, from the Commission for Research on the Abuse of Women. Exhibitions
Principio Potosí. Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer y Andreas Siekmann May 2010 Presentation of The Potosí Principle by the curatorial team, Alice Creischer, Max Hinderer and Andreas Siekmann. The Potosí Principle is a research, publication and debate project organized by Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, May 12th - September 6th, 2010), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin, October 7th, 2010 - January 3rd, 2011), and Museo Nacional de Arte and Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folclore (La Paz, February-May 2011). The Potosí Principle questions modernity by narrating it from the vantage point of the other, introducing the process of European emancipation as a cycle of global domination and exploitation which, having started in the 16th Century, is still ongoing. Exhibitions
Drifts and Derivations. A Conversation Between Lissette Lagnado and María Berrios May 2010 An itinerary with Lissette Lagnado and Maria Berrios through the exhibition Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, Journeys, and Morphologies (Museo Reina Sofía, May 5 - August 23). Through a series of topics, this conversation poses a specific kind of Modernity, which is neither alternate nor central, but which shows the possibilities of playful and poetic transformation of society and cases of collective pedagogy in architectonic episodes in Latin America in the secord third of the 20th Century. Exhibitions
Thomas Schütte February 2010 In relation to Thomas Schütte. Hindsight, this video presents a tour around the exhibition through a dialogue with the German artist, along with Julian Heynen, art historian and director of Kunstsammlung of Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Lynne Cooke, curator of the exhibition and deputy director of Museo Reina Sofía. Exhibitions
Two Readings On the Collection May 2010 For most of its existence, the museum has done the exact opposite. Far from recognising the tension between the inscrutability of meaning and the opening to another language in the modern art work, the museum has watered it down to a contemplation that has become an auratic ritual frozen in a distant past. Dos lecturas sobre la colección (Two readings on the collection), along with La Colección Reescrita (Rewriting The Collection) represents an attempt to reintroduce the staging of diverse timeframes and heterogeneous periods involving the historical narrative and its own materiality within the museum. In so far as it is an institution that orders objects, artefacts, documents and the relationships between these things and the public in a series of narrations, the museum must consider not only which stories it is to tell, but also what devices to employ for their narration. Seminars and conferences
Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement March 2010 Itinerary of the exhibition Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement, held in Museo Reina Sofía from March 31 to July 12, 2010. Through a selection of works by Mexican artist, the exhibition examines the limits of the art system and the presence of the other in the space of an art institution. Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) produced his work in a confinement of more than three decades in a mental hospital, making his own painting materials and exploring a unique iconography that refers to the estrangement between two worlds, the origin of rural and indigenous Mexico and destination, a United States in the midst of a full-blown industrial development. The question posed by the exhibition is the lack of a non-reductionist vocabulary for understanding artistic categories beyond those undertaken by history of art. Exhibitions
The Conceptualismos del Sur network on Losing the human form February 2010 Stricken bodies, mutant bodies: Losing the human form evokes an image of the 1980s in Latin America that draws a counterpoint between the devastating effects of violence on bodies, and the radical experiments of freedom and transformation that challenged the repressive order. Between horror and festivity, the selected materials show not only the atrocious consequences of countless disappearances and massacres occurring under the dictatorial regimes, states of siege and internal wars, but also the collective urges to create new ways of life, in continual revolution. Seminars and conferences
Tacita Dean: The Friar's Doodle March 2010 Tacita Dean: The Friar's Doodle (Museo Reina Sofia, Monastery of Silos March 23-June 27) is a site-specific exhibition reviewing the history of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos beyond its monumentality, classifying the traces of everyday life in the scribbles and graffiti of the columns of the cloister. In this inventory, the British artist shows a varied set of uses of space, such as as a witness to the work of the stonemasons, the rudimentary medieval games or the use the monastery as a shelter, building a fragmented and collective cultural history and relating film and photography with the evocations of minor narratives. Exhibitions
Pierre Huyghe: The Season of Celebrations March 2010 The Season of Celebrarions/ La saison des fêtes is a site-specific installation by Pierre Huyghe at the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro (March 17 to May 31, 2010) where, from a set of plant species in different seasons planted in a circle, the artist reviews the relationship between nature and tradition, myth, and celebration, recalling how events and the perception of time are determined by fiction and storytelling. In this video, Huyghe explains this site-specific project in relation to a series of constant lines of work which question time as phenomenology and reenactment as a mechanism for representation. Exhibitions