Activities

Inside the framework of the 2015-2016 Research Residencies, the playwright, stage director, writer and visual artist Javier Montero puts forward a project of critical research and collective production regarding the different forms of creativity, and the role they play in producing new subjectivities.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation-Restoration, the Geosciences Institute (CSIC-UCM), and the YOCOCU (YOuth in COnservation of CUltural Heritage) association have organized the fifth edition of the International Conference on Youth in Conservation of Cultural Heritage, celebrated from 21 to 23 September at the auditoriums of Nouvel Building.

This seminar analyses the role of Ulises Carrión (Mexico, 1941 - Holland, 1989) in conceiving new strategies to disseminate and distribute art from the mid-seventies, and the emphasis he placed on reinventing the uses, forms and appearances of the book as a device for action. 

The Interventions by Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum will analyse two interrelated problems. On one side, the production processes of hegemony in the current crisis scenario by the new social blocs emerging in Europe, and on the other, the cultural political economy related to current debates on the civilising change the human species is currently undergoing.

The international conference Cold Atlantic will examine the artistic, cultural and aesthetic exchanges produced between the USA, Europe, Africa and Latin America during the Cold War. The aim is to highlight the axes of alignment and artistic exchange between the geopolitically minor actors that were trapped inside the huge theatrical strategy from this period.

J. M. Coetzee is regarded as a writer of ideas. His literary work bears a distinctly philosophical imprint that is often woven around allegory, yet his stark, analytical view of racial conflict in South Africa, his country of origin, has not stood in the way of a broader horizon and an interest in other universally ethical and pressing causes, for instance the suffering and exploitation of animals, conceived as fragile and dispossessed beings, an issue which takes prominence in his intervention in the Museo.

At the present time, Humanities have lost the Renaissance concept stemming from the linguistic, social and philosophical-historical disciplines that were at every level of the formal education still taught a few decades back. The processes of globalisation inscribed in capitalist systems have prioritised education as a field of pragmatic knowledge at the expense of those disciplines engaged in the formation of civilised social coexistence and the role of citizenship understood from responsibility.  

In conjunction with his exhibition The Rocket and the Abyss (5 May to 2 October, 2016), held in the Palacio de Cristal, Damián Ortega will engage in conversation with Peio Aguirre to discuss his publishing work.

Inside the framework of Constituent Machines: Constituent Power, Biopolitics, Democracy, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold the second session in the programme of lectures and seminars, on this occasion conducted by Wolfgang Streeck.

Within the context of the networks in which the Museo Reina Sofía participates alongside collectives, organisations and independent research groups, the Museo’s Study Centre welcomes the conference Domesticities, organised by the Las Raras collective.

The Museo Reina Sofía will host a lecture and seminar by Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, to take place within the context of the programme Constituent Machines: Constituent Power, Biopolitics, Democracy, jointly organised with the Commons Foundation, and in collaboration with Intermediae.

New Babylon (1956–1974) is a networked city project conceived by the Dutch artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys for the “total fulfilment of life”, an approach to urbanism based on the freedom of the individual through the power of play and creativity. This activity, which marks the end of the retrospective in the Museo devoted to Constant, examines this total artwork’s place in the utopian urbanism that followed World War Two through a lecture by Anthony Vidler and a round-table discussion featuring participation from José Miguel de Prada Poole, Izaskun Chinchilla, José Pérez de Lama and Ethel Baraona.

In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse.

The Museo Reina Sofía Study Centre organises this encounter around the thinking of Rosi Braidotti, in reference to the publication of her book The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013). The intervention sees Rossi Braidotti explore the “posthuman turn”, understood as an event based on the convergence of posthumanism and postanthropocentrism.

Independent theatre groups in Spain revamped the stage from popular culture, university classrooms, alternative circuits and touring as a form of representation. As a whole, they represent a key chapter in the history of 20^th-century theatre in Spain, and this seminar, integrated into a broader network project, looks to remedy the absence of debates and studies around this crucial subject.

The confrontation between abstraction-realism and artistic imagination-social commitment has polarised a major part of 20th-century art history, dividing fronts, periods and movements from both sides. Yet the work of Andrzej Wróblewski (1927–1957) constitutes an exceptional chapter; the painter imagined a universe that was free from Biomorphic Abstraction whilst, on the back of the same painting, he figuratively documented the opposite: the existential suffering in the Second World War. This conversation introduces his work.

This double performance serves as an introduction to the Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Museo. The studied disappearance of the image in modern surveillance technology is developed in a performance lecture by the artist, followed by an exploration into the new acoustic landscape of war – between military noise and sounds from consumer devices - by Kassem Mosse. Both performances are a posthumous homage to Harun Farocki.

The Falckenberg Collection, built around the concept of art as a space of revolt, assembles one of the most salient historical ensembles of art criticism in post-war Germany and America. In the face of complacency over the market and its logics, this collection represents a counter-current to ways of understanding the role of and narratives that stem from collecting.

This encounter, within the framework of the project Redes, from the Museo’s Study Centre, sees sociologist Christian Laval and philosopher Pierre Dardot set out a reflection of “the common” as a strategic paradigm for considering new socio-economic and political concepts of use in the design of new forms of democratic organisation that go beyond the categories of representation and political sovereignty that are consubstantial with modernity.

Iconoclasm, desire, vulnerability, migration and cultural translation are some of the themes that impress particular intensity upon the work of Danh Vō. This encounter, also held in the Palacio de Cristal, sees the artist enter into conversation with Patricia Falguières, professor at the École des hautes etudes in social sciences in Paris, and author of essays such as Les Chambres de merveilles (Bayard, 2002).

This encounter serves as an introduction to the retrospective devoted to Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (Karachi, 1937 – Baroda, 1990), an exhibition that looks to acknowledge the specific nature of her work, beyond the canonical accounts that have systematically placed it within minimalist abstraction.

The Museo marks the 55^th anniversary of the OuLiPo group with two activities: The presentation of the work 66 Exercises in Style by Colectivo Armadillo, and a discussion which revolves around the group, which includes participation from illustrious specialists and certain members of this historic literary experiment.

The international conference Politics, State Power and the Making of Art History in Europe after 1945 explores the ways political power seeks to shape and influence the activities of art historians, art critics, museum professionals and cultural institutions in order to control the understanding of art and artistic heritage from 1945 to the present.