Multimedia

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.