Film and Video

The Museo Reina Sofía screens There Is Nothing to Understand Here, a documentary on artist Elena Asins (Madrid, 1940 — Azpirotz, Navarra, 2015), along with two of her unreleased short digital animation films. The documentary, made by Javi Álvarez and Olga Sevillano and produced by the Museo, is shown for the first time in Madrid following its international premiere at the Punto de Vista Film Festival in Navarra and a brief online viewing in May and June 2020.

In conjunction with the exhibition Belkis Ayón. Collographs (17 November 2021 – 18 April 2022), the Museo organises a tour through the show and a conversation with its curator Cristina Vives and Cuban artists Alexandre Arrechea and Luis Cabrera, both closely related to the figure of Ayón.

With the collective Red Solidaria de Acogida (the Refuge Solidarity Network) — a member of Museo Situado’s collaboration network — this latest edition of the Situated Voices programme seeks dialogue around this issue, which primarily afflicts undocumented migrant people whose lives are drained in a constant wait that leaves them on their own to face illness.

On this occasion, different specialist voices with an interest in the work of Maruja Mallo engage in conversation about her output following her return from exile and explore a selection of her late works, made from 1975 to 1982, conserved in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection.

Artist Andrea Büttner and Isabella Lenzi, an independent curator and research fellow in the Museo’s Collections Department, engage in conversation about Büttner’s work, which is part of Episode 8. Exodus and Communal Life, the final chapter in the new re-hang of the Collection. This event is organised inside the framework of a series of activations of the Collection throughout the month of March, underscoring feminist artistic practices and the work of women artists.

In this encounter, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh and Michelle Harewood present the key aspects of the exhibition From Posada to Isotype, from Kollwitz to Catlett, curated by both, in a survey on graphic art’s potential during historical avant-garde movements. 

This edition of Situated Voices, convened from RAMA and in collaboration with Museo Situado, seeks to reflect through young migrant and anti-racist activists to collectively imagine multi-faceted, creative, political and disobedient processes allowing anti-racism to be incorporated into the heart of struggles and thereupon to examine this intersection with other issues around education, participation in the political community, heteromormativity, climate justice, etc.   

This series presents the documentary and non-fiction cinema of five women filmmakers from the Middle East and the Maghreb: Atteyat Al-Abnoudy (Egypt, 1939–2018), Assia Djebar (Algeria, 1936–2015), Jocelyne Saab (Lebanon, 1948–2019), Heiny Srour (Lebanon, 1945) and Selma Baccar (Tunisia, 1945). Despite hailing from different regions and origins, their careers all started in the 1970s and they are representatives of a historical and countercurrent feminism that gives voice to the stories drowned out by the official history in countries of Arab culture.

The 23rd Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration and supported by MAPFRE Foundation, will be held on 24 and 25 February 2022. As an international encounter it sets out to share and debate experiences and research, open new channels of study and reflect upon the institutional management of conservation and the professional practice of restorers.

These sessions set out from the idea that a feminism with the will for transformation must prioritise the most oppressed and violated needs, giving precedence to those who sustain the reproduction of life with their work. A feminism that is truly transformative must place the material conditions of existence at the centre and be able to build syndicalism based on stable networks of mutual support, politicising individual problems and allowing struggles to connect, and at the same time intersecting racial, gender and class oppression.

Across six sessions, the study group Conjugating Worlds: Multi-Species Corporealities seeks to investigate alternative models in cultural and art theory, and in artistic practices, which radically challenge the relationship between animals and humans.  

The programme includes five of Tahimik’s feature-length films and a “carte blanche” session for the director, as well as Tahimik’s first appearance in film as an actor. Further, the series features debates and in-person conversations with the film-maker and his son, collaborator and leading actor, Kidlat de Guia.

Over the past six years, the Southern Conceptualisms Network and Museo Reina Sofía have joined forces to arrange this periodic encounter, which stems from the common sentiment of the need to urgently strike up a dialogue between spaces where memory gestates. This fourth edition, under the title Archives to Come, calls upon imaginative powers underlying archive practices and thought and the way in which they are capable of proposing alterations to the dominant temporalities limiting the construction of other chronologies, the seed of different futures.  

March 8 has become a symbol of protest that flows beyond this date to solidify synergies and feminist, historical and present struggles. For over a century now, this day has condensed and amplified a first basic premise: rights for all women always, every single day. From numerous corners, from the past and the present, we aspire to many more 8Ms — every single day. In this way, this program started in February will be extended until June. 

The Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a video programme created by contemporary Turkish artists, featuring works commissioned by the SALT Contemporary Art Centre — with sites in Istanbul and Ankara — to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the institution. Under the title Ardışık (The Sequential), the programme sketches the scene of the most salient recent art in Turkey and is set forth as a reflection of the major debates taking place in the country.

This fresh edition centres on the first screening in Spain of Mapping Lessons, a film made by Cairo-based film-maker and artist Philip Rizk, who will also be present at the event. The film is a montage of archives on the history of mass uprisings, spanning the Paris Commune in 1871 and more recent examples of self-organisation in Syria.

Archipelago once again makes its yearly return, inviting audiences to explore the complexity of the contemporary world through listening. In this particular edition, it looks to delve into the discourse of modernity in experimental music, its unrecognised roots and the history, politics and ideologies that govern our tastes.

This new edition analyses the presence of architecture in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive, a repository of memory containing, in fragments, the history of the institution: its origins as a hospital of neoclassicism, its role during the Spanish Civil War as a field hospital, its transformation into an art centre and its expansion as an international museum. Various landmarks that enable a micro history of civil and public architecture to be traced from the 18th century to the present day, but without losing sight of the process of configuration and the idea of what a museum must be.

This lecture series, the third instalment organised by the interuniversity group TURICOM — which is part of the project Paradoxical Modernity: Artistic and Tourist Experience in Developmentalist Spain (1959–1975), PGC2018-093422-B-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE) — endeavours to examine the relationship between tourist imaginaries and the visual arts from the 1960s onwards. . More specifically, this new edition centres on the concept of ruin as a centre of attraction for cultural habits and practices inside the sphere of tourism.

ESTUDIO III in Conversation is an encounter which is part of ESTUDIO III. Go Out to Encounter. Speak to Place, the third edition of a programme which brings together the investigations of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance, voice and word.

The Museo Reina Sofía presents the third edition of ESTUDIO, an annual programme which brings together work in a range of formats and is the outcome of research conducted by a series of artists and researchers whose practices are tied, either directly or dialogically, to the sphere of choreography and performance.

This round-table discussion on municipalist graphic art concludes the programme of this new edition, following an initial creative workshop conducted by Enrique Flores and held from 10 to 12 November 2021.

Maruja Mallo (Viveiro, Lugo, 1902 – Madrid, 1995) is considered a key artist in the Museo Reina Sofía Collection. This encounter presents the catalogue raisonnée of oil paintings from her artistic practice as a whole and brings together many of the foremost specialists to have worked on her output.

Intervals is a regular programme which premieres film work that lies beyond the Museo Reina Sofía’s mainstream circuit. This new edition centres on New Sevilles, a feature made by film-maker Gonzalo García-Pelayo (Madrid, 1947) and artist and researcher Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964) which was awarded the Prize for Best Film (Ex Aequo) in the New Waves – No Fiction section of the 18th Seville Film Festival and drifts around the Spanish city through history and to the contemporary beat of flamenco.

This creative workshop, conducted by illustrator Enrique Flores, revolves around the concept of “illustrated journalism”, a way of narrating the present from illustration. It has been set up to carry out a sketched chronicle of daily life inside the Museo, conceiving it as a living institution which is permeable to the city and with myriad activities that stretch beyond regular visits.

This cycle showcases a selection of USA's indepedent black film through an antropological retrospective organized by Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española that, for the first time, compiles a century of film directed exclusively by afroamerican film-makers.

Filipino film-maker and artist Kidlat Tahimik (Baguio, 1942) presents his latest film Balikbayan #1: Memories of Overdevelopment Redux IV, a new edit of a project spanning thirty years on the circumnavigation of the Earth and Western accounts of the “discovery” of the New World. The artist will also take part in an online encounter with Sara Nadal-Melsió, organised by Museo Reina Sofía and the King Carlos I of Spain Center at New York University (NYU-KJCC).

Songs of the Contemporary Social War II is a project carried out inside the framework of the exhibition Pedro G. Romero. Verse-Composing Machines and comprises a large-scale installation and stage design conceived by Pedro G. Romero as a form of improvised square where live musical performances unfold. Inside these musical pieces, songs that Guy Debord, Alice Becker-Ho and other situationists wrote about Spain in the transition to democracy are performed and have been recovered by this artist and researcher.

In conjunction with the exhibition Magellan, Marilyn, Mickey & Fr. Dámaso. 500 Years of Conquistador RockStars (29 October 2021 – 6 March 2022), the Museo Reina Sofía organises a film-making workshop centred around colonial geographies and histories and directed by film-makers and artists Kidlat Tahimik (Philippines, 1942) and Sally Gutiérrez Dewar (Spain, 1965). 

For the second year, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine by choreographer Mette Edvardsen, a project where people from different countries memorise books of their choice. Together, they form a library collection of “living books” which, at stipulated times, are available to the public in the form of individual encounters from which to recite what has been learned to a visitor.

This encounter is inspired by the Chilean collective’s work and seeks to offer a space of dialogue with them and with feminist collectives from Madrid to reflect upon the impact of their action, the significance of its upsurge, and its power to bring about new common feminist meaning inside the reverberation of this global wail that follows the wake of the mass strikes and protests of the 8M movement and the struggles for abortion rights.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair invites art historian José Emilio Burucúa (Buenos Aires, 1946) to conduct a seminar devoted to the cultural history of hope and a master lecture on man-nature relationships by means of artistic representations of the elephant.

In this inaugural edition of the Expanded Theatricalities Chair, the work and ideas of composer and director Heiner Goebbels (Germany, 1952) engage in dialogue with the proposals of artists María Jerez, Pablo Palacio and Silvia Zayas, continuing the debate on expanded theatricalities in these times of Anthropocene crisis — one that can also be considered a crisis of the insurgence of matter, following the ideas of Suely Rolnik. 

Museo Situado organises the School of Rights, coordinated by Red Interlavapiés (the Interlavapiés Network) in order to build a collective space of information, advice and community legal support to deal with the rights violations migrant people face on a daily basis.

Cinema has spent a century or more informing about happiness and, in the sense of shaping, modelling imaginaries and desires. This film series assembles twelve feature-length, medium-length and short films that bear witness to a form of little-known happiness — public happiness — and is set forth in connection with the documentary exhibition under the same title, comprising a diptych devoted to the citizen ideal and social utopia.

To mark the 16^th edition of Book Night, the Museo Reina Sofía’s Library and Documentation Centre present a new poem by artist Eduardo Scala entitled INSTANTeTERNO (INSTANT and ETERNAL), written for this occasion.

Tomàs Llorens (1936–2021), a key figure of art history and Spain’s museum landscape, passed away on 10 June this year in Dénia. His professional activity was decisive in founding the most salient modern art museums in Spain at the beginning of the democratic period. This homage features a pre-eminent selection of interventions — both in-person and online – by figures linked to curatorship, art history, architecture and fine arts, all of which are representative of the professional and intellectual interests of Tomàs Llorens.

The Forms of Making, the Making of Forms is a programme on methodologies, tools and techniques in artistic practice. In its fourth edition, Teresa Lanceta conveys, via an online public lecture, the learning attained in her explorations of the rhombus. Based on her reflections, she will conduct a workshop whereby each participant can share and set up a dialogue with ‘their own form’, which stems either from their work or any other meaningful sphere in their life.   

This international seminar prompts passage from violence and fear to the community of affection (“to be affected by” and “to affect”), drawing on social activism, artistic creation and critical thought to range across sensibility, language, bodies, imagination and politics.

For Moroccan artist Safaa Erruas (Tetouan, 1976) the act of weaving opens up a rethinking of the history underlying all women: the history of our bodies, our lived experiences, our travels, materialising and entwining with the histories of other people who simultaneously weave the same cloth. This workshop is geared towards the collective production of a textile piece which, in contrast to traditional weaving, comprises objects and elements from our daily lives. 

But Tomorrow the Light Will Be for Others. Film and Indigenous Lives encompasses a broad chronological arc that spans from 1970 to 2020, from the indiscriminate massacre known in Latin America as ethnocide to the Zapatista delegation’s recent journey from the Chiapas jungle to Europe’s major cities; a journey which seeks to rediscover models of co-existence and good living for a worn-out West.

This programme seeks to put forward dialogue between the Zapatista, European and Global South experiences of self-government. The encounter sets in motion questions around institutionality, care, economies, redistribution, and radical teaching as a form of insurgent imagination decolonised from Eurocentric notions of utopia, and with the capacity to break the hegemony of present and future capitalist visions.