Film and Video

Specters: A Ciné-politics of Haunting gathers a selection of recent international film and video that conjures the hauntings of our collective cultural imaginary. Some phantoms arise from past injustices and political traumas, some apparitions, of catastrophic times to come.

A programme of actions and activities within the context of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, devised by the collective Subtramas (Diego del Pozo, Montse Romaní and Virginia Villaplana). These actions take place inside the galleries of the exhibition and feature participation from different social and cultural collectives.

Within the framework of the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, artist Trevor Paglen and journalist and programmer Jacob Appelbaum debate the increase of government surveillance and the way in which this affects people’s freedom and their ability to act.

This film season continues a series of programmes that have addressed the change to structures, narrations and methods of film-making in recent Spanish cinema. With three editions to date, The Memory of Disrepute develops, through double sessions, how other cinema invents its own genealogy, exercising a discontinuous and partisan history of recent cinema.

Appropriating the theme raised by Richard Hamilton in his well-known 1956 collage, this seminar examines the crossover between artistic practices and popular culture that gave rise to multiple phenomena associated with Pop Art. With participation from Kerstin Stakemeier, Eloy Fernández Porta, Diedrich Diederichsen and Benjamin Buchloh.

Short Dance Films is a touring programme that includes a selection of forty-five short dance films produced in Europe in recent years. It is curated by Núria Font/NU2’s, commissioned by the European Dancehouse Network, a network with the participation of 20 dance houses from 16 countries.

This programme presents pop confronting pop, recognising the seduction of consumer culture whilst also keeping it at a critical distance. In relation to the exhibition devoted to Richard Hamilton, this series approaches the popular as subversion and as an investigation into the characteristics of a new society that emerged between the 1950s and 1970s.

Performing Gender is a European project that takes a critical look at the politics of gender and sexuality using dance and performance tools. Bodies and their multiple gender inscriptions are the subject of exploration and experimentation by a group of artists that, over the course of one year, have carried out their research by touring around different European institutions.

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film, with their work condensing a complex palimpsest of voices that, found between nascent politics of representation, put forward a language of diaspora.

This activity introduces the artist’s first individual exhibition in Europe, Kerry James Marshall: Painting and Other Stuff (13 June – 26 October, 2014), as he presents his work as an analysis of Afro-American racial identity and the space of the black subject, both in the current social context and in official history.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.

Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the annual celebration of International Museum Day (IMD) with two open days and a selection of activities that aim to take a deeper look at the dialogue between the collections and the public, as well as reinforcing the idea of the museum as a space for non-disciplinary education and collective learning.

This seminar forms part of a tri-annual project that explores expanded theatricalities in different areas: the public sphere, the city, the home, networks of affection, schools and educational spaces.

As part of the Intervalos programme, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s latest work is screened, with both film-makers also participating at an encounter. Joining film practices based on found footage, documentary and experimental cinema, Pays Barbare is a complex tale about historical memory, fascism and colonialism.

Presented as the culmination of the course on critical practices developed by Observatorio Metropolitano in the Museo, this seminar addresses the recent waves and movements of democracy, from Latin America to the Arab Spring. Over three days the sociologists Asef Bayat and Luis Tapia Mealla will debate the new international constituent situation.

The exhibition Playgrounds takes a historical and political approach to space for play and its socialising and transgressive potential. In dialogue with the exhibition, this course and seminar debates the expansion of art towards spheres of institutional experimentation and intervention in public space, ultimately endeavouring to highlight the role of play in new modes of contemporary subjectivation.

The Association of Dance Professionals in the Madrid Community and the Cultural Association for Dance, together with the Museum, have organized a total of 10 performances with different dance styles coexisting alongside plastic arts.

The transformations in Europe over the past three decades challenge national historical/critical narratives, and those based on apparent global continuity. This debate explores how art practices have influenced these situations in constant flux, calling into question these narratives and imagining possible alternatives.

With regard to the acknowledgement of research networks in different fields and new methods of collection and dissemination stemming from archive practices, the Museo Reina Sofía presents this project. MASE is a collective of researchers, critics and artists connected to sound art and an innovative online archive and platform in a traditionally ignored field.

The Museo welcomes the choreographer and dancer Simone Forti. The encounter is made up of a conversation between Forti and Tania Arias, with a presentation in the Nouvel Auditorium Hall of the results of some of the work produced by students in the workshop run by Forti in La Casa Encendida.

Cinema is a privileged medium in the narrative construction of biography, yet, in the face of narcissism from the mythologies of self, this film series shows life in its temporary form, both fragile and precarious, and presents a programme that spans from Neorealism to recent post-colonial cinema.

This is the premiere of the film-maker’s most recent production, which coincides with the exhibition and film program devoted to his work. Shot in one single take, Ana Arabia demonstrates the utopian coexistence of a community of Jews and Muslims as they withstand urban speculation.

Artist and writer engage in conversation, dialogue that coincides with the opening of SPLENDIDE-HOTEL, a site-specific project carried out by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster in the Palacio de Cristal. Fiction within reality, compulsive reading or literature as a tool for understanding the world, these are elements shared by both and mark an ongoing collaboration.

Portuguese choreographer Cláudia Dias presents her latest composition, Vontade de Ter Vontade, a solo inspired by two works by the writers and thinkers Tony Judt and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Through this piece Dias prolongs her work on identity and territory.

A workshop based on the technique created by the Portuguese artist João Fiadeiro. Composition in Real Time is a method of investigation on different forms of encounter, and its use perpetually aims to be in relation with the other. Its utopia is collective experience, being together, whether in a social or artistic context.