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In March 2019, the Museo opened a call to participate in the performance of the piece Udlot Udlot (1975), by Philippine composer José Maceda, whose work combined his interest in traditional music from Southeast Asia and Europe. The performance of the piece required no prior musical knowledge, simply attendance at a workshop organised by the Museo, in collaboration with the Escuela Municipal de Música y Danza del Distrito Centro María Dolores Pradera. Some one hundred people learnt the score together and kept in time with its rhythms. During the current pandemic, the experience reminds us of something essential: the power of union and respectful co-existence, not only between humans but with all other living organisms on the planet.   

For the third year running, the programme Archipelago encourages an understanding of the complexity of the contemporary world through listening, exploring what is understood by experimental music and the relation it bears to popular culture by way of different narratives and geographies. 

The present edition explores the concept of tradition: a term predominantly associated with conservatism and regression in the face of change, but with a meaning that implies the transfer of knowledge from one person to another and from one generation to the next.

This retrospective exhibition devoted to the work of Jörg Immendorff (Bleckede, Germany, 1945 –Düsseldorf, Germany, 2007) surveys a career spanning more than four decades, setting forth the key stages and transformations in the artist’s work: from the sociopolitical and political upheaval works he conceived between the 1960s and early 1980s, to the encoded paintings in the latter stages of his output.

This retrospective on the work of Mario Merz (Milan, Italy, 1925 – Milan, Italy, 2003) surveys the provenance of a body of work suspended in a kind of pre-historic time, at odds with the discourse of modern-era history. This anachronistic perspective, apparent in the choice of materials and iconography, stems from the ideological and committed stance of an artist and his relation to the political and intellectual climate in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, in addition to his rejection of pervasive capitalism and the American way of life after the Second World War.

The search for mythology distinguished Merz’s work from his kindred contemporaries, for his archaism bore no relation to a melancholic yearning for the past, but instead was related to a razor-sharp critique of industrial and consumerist modernity.   

As part of the performing arts series staged in collaboration with the Community of Madrid’s Teatros del Canal, the Museo Reina Sofía presents, over two sessions, Corbeaux (Crows), by choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen.

Corbeaux is a kind of “living sculpture” with no contrivance, comprising raw elements, gestures, silences and, at times, the cries of a group of women dressed in black, their bodies creating figures and forms in the space they share with spectators. As the piece evolves, pre-conceived notions of time and space vanish, making way for a hard-to-classify lived experience intended to be both intimate and universal.

Delphine Seyrig (1932-1990) is best known for the roles she played in French auteur cinema, most notably in Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, directed by Alain Resnais. However, during the 1970s, she became indeed an activist working collaboratively within the framework of the feminist movement. Around 1975, together with activist video maker Carole Roussopoulos and translator Ioana Wieder, she produced a series of videos under the collective name “Les Insoumuses” (Defiant Muses). This exhibition explores the intersection between the histories of cinema, video and feminism in France.

Focusing on the emergence of video collectives in the 1970s, the exhibition proposes to reconsider the history of the feminist movement in France through a set of media practices and looks at a network of creative alliances that emerged in a time of political turmoil.

From the late 1970s until his untimely death in 1992 through AIDS-related complications, David Wojnarowicz (New Jersey, USA, 1954 — New York, USA, 1992) produced a body of work that was as conceptually rigorous as it was stylistically diverse. His artistic career fused a broad array of forms, mediums and devices, for instance the use of photography as a narrative tool; collage as a resource for critique and political statements, stressed through the poverty of the medium; painting adopted to explore different allegorical processes; and photomontage and text employed as an approach to the queer and identity politics that also shaped his role as an activist.

The work of Japanese artist Tetsuya Ishida (Yaizu, Shizuoka, 1973 – Tokyo, 2005) gives the experience of the contemporary subject a face as it explores the uncertainty and desolation of Japanese society, drastically altered by the technological advances and successive crises that have affected economies and politics the world over. More specifically, Ishida portrays, with descriptive precision, the mood of his generation, defined by the bursting bubble of finance and real estate and the mass lay-offs that plunged the country into a deep recession in 1991.

Keep Reading, Giving Rise is the first retrospective of the artist Rogelio López Cuenca (Nerja, 1959). He has worked at the crossroads between the visual arts and the mass media. Taking writing off the page, he has exercised his own visual poetry that operates inside the tradition of institutional critique and the offshoots of Pop through multiple mediums such as painting, installation, urban interventions and publishing.

The Peruvian journal Amauta (1926–1930), founded and directed by José Carlos Mariátegui (Moquegua, Peru, 1894 – Lima, Peru, 1930), was one of the most influential publications in twentieth-century art. Conceived as a platform for the core debates on modernity, and in contrast to other avant-garde publications, Amauta was not the expression of one group, nor did it seek to impose one sole aesthetic or political programme. Rather, it aspired to become a medium with which to explore and discuss different movements of social transformation.