Film and Video

The Museo Reina Sofía brings International Dance Day forward to Saturday 28 April with a double programme showcasing the work of choreographers Sofía Asencio (Societat Doctor Alonso) and María Muñoz (Mal Pelo), accompanied by Tirso Orive and Federica Porello, respectively.

The coda to the activities conducted by Franco Berardi Bifo in the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present will feature a screening of the film Comunismo futuro (Future Communism), scripted and narrated by the Italian writer and directed by Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg. Moreover, both will present the film and subsequently discuss it with the audience.

Franco Berardi Bifo is a philosopher, writer and media theorist.

For this session of the programme Six Contradictions and the End of the Present Bifo will conduct three activities in the Museo: a public lecture, a research workshop and the presentation of the film Comunismo future (2017). In the lecture, the philosopher explores new forms of power and domination; the workshop will be set up as a work session with writings chosen specifically by the author and, as a coda to the session, Bifo will present, with Andrea Gropplero di Troppenburg, the film Comunismo futuro.

In conjunction with the opening of Marc Pataut. First Attempts, the galleries of the exhibition will play host to a conversation between the artist and Jorge Ribalta, the show’s curator, on photography as an instrument for capturing life at its most vulnerable and precarious, and as a  public service and a form of institutional critique. Other issues addressed will include the ethics of representation of the disadvantaged subject and, ultimately, the reasons why photography remains pivotal as an artistic practice of the real. 

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) and the invention of the modern subject in a body of writing intersected by melancholy and the conception of multiple fictitious identities form the backbone of this series, a survey on the author of The Book of Disquiet from the perspective of film. The programme touches upon themes such as the relationship between writing and life, performance and narrative, and non-literary forms of text, featuring films by four Portuguese directors, Manoel de Oliveira, João Botelho, Paulo Rocha, and João César Monteiro, and one Brazilian, Júlio Bressane, whose work constitutes, historically speaking, a playful, popular and counter-cultural opposition to Cinema Novo.

The exhibition devoted to Dora García (Valladolid, 1965) is accompanied by a specific programme of performances by the artist. Carried out during the exhibition period, this initiative seeks to vindicate performance as a privileged medium, moving closer to the core strands in García’s work. In this vein, three main ideas will be illuminated: fiction as a construction of situations, readings understood as a collective process which redefines works and the relationships between readers, and narration as a critical exercise in terms of the roles undertaken. Ultimately, these ideas stress how the capacity for giving form, transforming and dismantling accounts that pass through us is an action of resistance.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents The Words of Others by Argentinean artist León Ferrari (Buenos Aires, 1923–2013), a collage he produced between 1965 and 1967, the year it was released by the Argentinean publishing house Falbo. On this occasion, the piece will be performed in full for the first time in Spanish. In the two days leading up to the rendering of this literary collage, and in order to update the issues running through it, the international seminar A Theatre of the Present. Rhetoric and Power in León Ferrari’s The Words of Others, co-organised by Museo Reina Sofía and ARTEA, will be held in the Museo.    

The Words of Others remains a theatre of the present because the condemnation of stances and modes is repeated, as are the authoritarian drift, inequality and segregation as forms of domination. It is no wonder that an artist hitherto focused on producing ceramics, sculptures and drawings ended up creating a theatrical collage with which to intervene in the present he faced: the real-time clash with the public sphere proved to be the most effective approach for a practice in need of becoming politically active.

This latest instalment of the programme Intervalos (Intervals), devoted to recent experimental and auteur cinema without distribution or release, features the first and last work by Colombian director Luis Ospina in a double bill attended by the film-maker. This Interval is a coda to the retrospective on the artist held in the Museo in 2015, dovetailing a number of the themes explored in the Intervalos programme.

The joint presentation of the Cubism Collections of the Telefónica Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía affords an opportunity to reconsider conventional narratives of the Cubist experience. This day-long seminar responds to this need, setting out to address diverse conceptions in the Cubist experience and aiming to encapsulate Cubism’s capacity for dissemination and refraction.

The programme Pessoa: A Brief History of Modern Art, accompanying and serving as a counterpoint to Pessoa: All Art Is a Form of Literature, an exhibition organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which focuses on the Portuguese avant-garde through a reading of the work of the Portuguese poet, seeks, via different perspectives, to offer an approach to one of the most complex, enigmatic and multifarious narratives in literature.

This third session culminates the program "Pessoa: brief history of modern art", a series of three talks in which some of the theoretical keys of modern art are reviewed from the writings of Fernando Pessoa. This last intervention will be carried out by the novelist and essayist Tom McCarthy. The author of Satin Island or Remainder is one of the most debated and acclaimed contemporary experimental writers.

The meteoric rise of digital giants worldwide has posed a raft of unsettling questions on the concentration of political, economic and social power in the hands of tech brokers.

This session will analyse and discuss the possible alternatives to this invisible and all-powerful government of the algorithm and Big Data, ranging from the design of new data ownership models to algorithms being subjected to audits, via the creation of cooperate platforms or the comprehensive nationalisation of technology platforms. 

In conjunction with the exhibition on the artist held in the Museo, Diego García-Moreno’s documentary Beatriz González. ¿Por qué llora si ya reí? (Why Are You Crying If I’d Already Laughed?) will be screened on 22 March, followed by a conversation with the artist, curator and teacher.

Presented within the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme centred on experimental cinema historian and theorist P. Adams Sitney (New Haven, Connecticut, 1944), this research seminar, conducted by Sitney, revolves around the structure and language of auteur cinema.

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.