Film and Video

The Museo Reina Sofía will focus on the work of film theorist and historian P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944) through Visions of Experimental Cinema, a programme featuring a lecture and seminar conducted by the author. The lecture will see Sitney address the history of avant-garde audiovisual practices in the United States, identifying a series of continuities and deviations in the conception of experimental cinema by different film-makers, for instance Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, and Su Friedrich, whose films will be screened after the lecture. The seminar, on the other hand, will offer analysis tools to understand the visual grammar of auteur and experimental film-making. 

In this lecture, theorist and experimental cinema historian P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944) will discuss the nature and history of experimental American film in the second half of the twentieth century.

This session sets out to debate the critical potential of Pessoan heteronyms, analysing at once the central roles of biography and the author in modernity.

In conjunction with the actions to be organised worldwide by the feminist movement on 8 March 2018, the Museo Reina Sofía will initiate a round-table discussion, setting out to offer a space of reflection and coordination between different stances and voices that are currently active in Madrid.

The Jorge Oteiza Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía present the book Oteiza. Catálogo razonado de escultura (Oteiza. Catalogue Raisonné of Sculpture), a critical survey of the work of the artist which compiles and analyses 2,752 pieces from public and private collections, including those which hold a prominent position in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collection 2: Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945–1968). The book also sets forth a reflection on the notion of “cataloguing”, or “normalising”, an artist who forever evaded all normalisation.

The programme Documents explores the book as an artistic medium, the possibilities and narratives of the archive, independent publishing and dissemination, and other strands of research in relation to the work of the Museo Reina Sofía Library and Documentation Centre. This fifth session is devoted to a conversation with the artist Francesc Abad and the recent publication of the book Napa(s). Persistir en lo inacabado [Napa(s). Persist with the Unfinished] (Ediciones La Bahía, 2017).

Within the framework of the exhibition Esther Ferrer. All Variations Are Valid, Including this One, the Museo Reina Sofía presents Actions, a series of interventions arranged with scores in the form of a user manual and directed by Esther Ferrer (San Sebastián, 1937) in person.

This session zooms in on Fernando Pessoa’s relationship with past avant-garde movements, focusing on the artistic criteria put forward by the poet and the alternative narratives of these movements in order to survey the history of modern art.

In Portugal António Reis (1927–1991) is regarded a visionary, a master who had a major influence on the awakening of Portuguese cinema after Salazar’s dictatorship and on a new generation of film-makers in the 1980s and 1990s. Alongside his wife, psychologist Margarida Cordeiro (1939), he directed four films, shot in a new lyrical and hypnotic language. These films are presented in this film series with Manoel de Oliveira’s film Rite of Spring, on which Reis worked as assistant director and which denoted the beginnings of ethnographic and poetic film-making.

Within the framework of the exhibition George Herriman. Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat is Krazy Kat, the Museum organizes a conference with the author of comics Art Spiegelman. The creator of Maus (1986) will explore his vision of the comic understood as a battle zone in postliterary times, in which art and commerce, high culture and popular, adult and child, reality and fantasy and, above all, the words and images collide with each other with special intensity.

Within the framework of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, the Museo Reina Sofía presents We Forge The Future, a performance by the industrial rock band Laibach, who formed in 1980 and is one of three landmark groups making up the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst). The performance will be preceded by a guided tour of the exhibition led by Laibach member Ivan Novak.   

In conjunction with the historical re-enactment of the performance We Forge The Future, by the industrial rock band Laibach — a member of the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) — in the Museo Reina Sofía, one of the band’s members, Ivan Novak, will lead a guided tour of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia.

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In conjunction with the film series The Eye in Matter. Dziga Vertov and Early Soviet Cinema, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, the artist and film-maker Peter Kubelka will conduct a workshop on filmic creation, centred on debate and experimentation. The workshop will see Kubelka present and debate his work with the audience.

Adam Curtis reveals the way power works, its meandering architecture, the ideas that configure it, the agents and institutions involved, the way it is etched into contemporary geopolitics, into us. Power reverberates through one of the most lucid and revealing bodies of work in recent times, part of which is the focus of this film series. The films, remastered in new versions, are complemented with a masterclass, two sessions with carte blanche, ‘blank pages’, and a series of presentations.

On the occasion of the exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough (November 1, 2017 - March 19, 2018), the artist gives a performative lecture that analyzes his relationship with the drawing and the creative process.

The Museo Reina Sofía master lectures, which mark the start of the Study Centre’s academic activity every year, set out to explore the different approaches and methodologies which have stretched art history in recent times. These lectures, which came into being in 2010, have been conducted by eminent art historians and theorists such as Linda Nochlin, T. J. Clark, Hans Belting, Simón Marchán and Benjamin Buchloh.

In conjunction with Palimpsest, the installation Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958) will display in the Palacio de Cristal from 6 October, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter between the artist and the historian Estrella de Diego, where both will examine how art confronts the way in which violence perforates each gesture, object and situation in contemporary society.

Part retrospective and part recontextualization, this series presents a number of Vertov’s feature films and selections from his early chronicles, together with documentaries from the early soviet cinema.

The role the archive plays in contemporary culture, by virtue of its powerful metaphorical potential and as a tool of knowledge and resistance, has been broadly explored in many exhibitions, publications and encounters over the past two decades.

Archipelago is a new series of concerts that views listening at once as a form of knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment.

Archipiélago es un ciclo de conciertos y un proyecto de investigación que se desarrolla entre 2017 y 2023 con el objetivo de cuestionar la universalidad del término “experimentación" en el ámbito de la música occidental. Surgido como concepto en Estados Unidos, este término se ha replicado hasta generar un canon e incluso un género. A lo largo de sus diferentes ediciones, este ciclo reúne a diferentes músicos, performers e investigadores de diversas partes del mundo en un intento de repensar otras formas de experimentación alejadas de los marcos de pensamiento hegemónicos. En colaboración con agrupaciones musicales y artistas procedentes de distintas áreas geográficas, Archipiélago aborda este concepto de “experimentación” desde variadas perspectivas.

As a culmination of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with the artist Franz Erhard Walther (Fulda, 1939), featuring the participation of Elena Filipovic, Christian Rattemeyer and João Fernandes. The conversation also serves as an accompaniment to a series of activations performed by Walther.

How do the film-makers negotiate the paradoxical side of the painting, between allegory and index? What are the different ‘Guernicas’ that appear in these four essay films?

This conversation takes place inside the public programme Dialogues, formulated by the museum confederation L’Internationale, and departs from four core areas, inviting different thinkers, artists and activists to address terms which resonate in the present. The activity sees political theorist Chantal Mouffe and the philosopher Didier Eribon debate the term populism in relation to citizen representation and cultural institutions.

This seminar, comprised of a series of lectures, addresses the transformations and surveys of modern utopia in post-war abstraction between Latin America and Eastern Europe.

How to rethink Guernica without reaffirming a canon linked to the universal and ahistorical condition of an icon? Scholars from different fields of knowledge - feminism, political theory, criticism and history of literature, cultural studies and history of art - will examine the work in its 80^th anniversary from different concepts and references. Juliet Mitchell and Mignon Nixon, Chantal Mouffe, Lucy Lippard, José-Carlos Mainer, Dario Gamboni and Maurizio Lazzarato and Eric Alliez are part of this series of lectures which seeks to understand and challenge the current influence of the mural.

This activity introduces the thinking of the Brazilian intellectual inside the space of the retrospective dedicated to his work. The talk seeks to disseminate his main ideas in connection with the artists and works that accompany his reflections. Mário Pedrosa (Pernambuco, 1900 – Rio de Janeiro, 1981) was a tireless critic and historian and the author of a unique concept of modernity, whereby art, as he put it, is the “experimental exercise of freedom”.

In Brazil, in 1959, the International Congress of Art Critics was held, a symposium where artists, architects, art and architectural historians were brought together to debate the role of modernity in a new world surfacing in the post-war period. This new reading of the minutes sets out to activate the document, understood as a performative exercise of a past utopian episode that still has huge potency and resonates in a present time in which art history and critique have been displaced from their role and public influence.

This series presents the filmic actions, imaginaries and productions of  the Tricontinental, a collaboration between Global South countries during the period of decolonisation and emancipation in the 1960s and 1970s. A cosmopolitan surge of activity interspersed and  circulated hitherto national and fragmentary debates over the so-called Third Cinema and the New European cinemas, constructing an alter-global network involving film-makers such as Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, Leon Hirszman, Humberto Solás, Santiago Álvarez, Ousmane Sembène, Sarah Maldoror and Masao Adachi.

In conjunction with the exhibition Pity and Terror in Picasso. The Path to Guernica and the eightieth anniversary of the first showing of Guernica, the Museo Reina Sofía presents Deep Song by Martha Graham (1894–1991), a dance solo created by the American choreographer as a response to the Spanish Civil War and performed, on this occasion, by Blakeley White-McGuire from the Martha Graham Dance Company.

En estas conferencias se analizarán y ampliarán las ideas claves de la exposición Piedad y terror en Picasso. El camino a Guernica. En concreto, se atenderá a cómo la guerra –a través de sus imágenes, su tecnología y la progresiva aniquilación de una serie de valores hasta entonces estables-, dejó su impronta en la obra de Picasso, conduciendo a la transformación de la misma idea de arte moderno. El ciclo contará con intervenciones de TJ Clark, Anne Wagner, Rosario Peiró, Charlie Miller, Nancy Berthier y Eugenio Carmona.

This seminar, framed inside the European network Midstream, seeks to reflect on the role of culture in those social movements that vindicate uses of urban space outside a city model which looks towards art to strengthen tourist imaginaries, thus conditioning its institutions and reception. The lectures, held in Málaga, examine the way Picasso is used to shape the contemporary city.

Inside the framework of International Women’s Day, a conversation is set up between anthropologist Rita Laura Segato and sociologist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar as they seek to pinpoint the inequalities that still exist today under a range of focal points: from gender violence and domestic slavery to the coloniality of power used strategically as an objective of war by some states.

The so-called “refugee crisis” has pervaded Western screens, showing death in the Mediterranean and the exodus through Europe as a major humanitarian catastrophe. This series looks at how artists and film-makers in Europe and the Middle East have reacted to the situation, reflecting on the implications of its visibility and the strategies for responding to what is shown.

Argentinian artist David Lamelas’ incorporation of the notion of duration and real time into different mediums is one of the most profound. This programme brings together the entire Time as Activity film series, in which the artist has recorded different cities at specific times, starting in 1969 and running up to the present day. The series interweaves the phenomenology of art from 1960 with the continuous, global and hyperconnected time of the intangible economy.

In conjunction with Argentina’s special participation as Guest Country at ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía presents a piece by the Spanish-Argentinian composer Fabián Panisello entitled L’officina della resurrezione, which was created in 2013. The work seeks to establish a musical dialogue between biblical texts from the Book of Ezequiel and the writings of Erri de Luca, a prestigious Italian writer known for his commitment to social issues.

Within the framework of the parallel programming in relation to Argentina as Guest Country at ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía presents the intervention Eine Brise. Flüchtige Aktion für 111 Radfahrer (A Breeze. Transient Action for 111 Cyclists).

On the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to the artist Bruce Conner, Bruce Conner. It’s All True, at the Museo Reina Sofía (from February 22 to May 22, 2017), an encounter is presented between specialists Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels that seeks to analyze the influence of the creator in current artistic practices. Over the last decade, a number of artists have turned their attention to artistic figures from the last century who explored the production of hybrid forms, challenging artistic genres. In this sense, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is one of the most representative cases.

In conjunction with ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía sets up an encounter between different professionals from European and Latin American museum institutions. The aim is to create synergies, promote joint institutional projects and put forth a reflection on the role of museums at the present time.

In conjunction with Argentina’s special participation as the Guest Country at ARCOMadrid 2017, the Museo Reina Sofía presents La Wagner, a work by the Argentinian dancer and choreographer Pablo Rotemberg. First performed in 2013, the piece was awarded the Main Prize in Choreographic Direction and Choreography at the World Theatre Awards.

This activity is linked to the Seminar Dance, Gender and Nation 1930-1960, held in the Museo Reina Sofía from 29 September to 1 October 2016, and presents the results of the Workshop of Choreographic Research and Reconstruction: The Bolero School developed at the Conservatorio Superior de Danza María de Ávila between October 2016 and February 2017, inside the framework of the R+D+I project Dance During the Civil War and Francoism (1930–1960): Cultural Politics, Identity, Gender and Choreographic Heritage.

Founded in Egypt with the publication of their manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, the Art et Liberté Group (1938 – 1948), proposed a new understanding of Surrealism. This presentation also studies their visual and literary contributions beyond the polemics of post-colonial discourse, advocating for a new art-historical understanding of the Surrealist movement.