Activities

This seminar seeks to contribute to the discussion begun by the exhibition Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010 (MUSAC, León, 24 June 2012 - 23 February 2013). This exhibition, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, highlights the role of discourses concerning gender and sexual identities in contemporary Spanish art, a topic traditionally ignored by historiography. The project, in parallel with the successive rearrangements of the Museum's Collection, proposes a rereading of recent art history in Spain, with different eyes and from a different perspective, recovering the work of many female artists who have been unfairly disdained.

This presentation introduces the publication Losing the human form. A seismic image of the 1980s in Latin America, conceived in connection to and in dialogue with the exhibition of the same name. The publication, unlike a conventional catalogue, does not enumerate the works and practices found in the exhibition but rather presents itself as yet another (possible) mechanism by which to activate these practices in a reflection about the present.

Museum curators and international specialists gather to discuss the challenges faced by cultural institutions in their endeavour to activate and disseminate contemporary art. The seminar, designed to stimulate dialogue between Europe and Latin America, centers on the search for effective means of cooperation regarding production, research, memory and education.

This seminar studies audiovisual works that use methodologies and processes of a collective nature at different levels. This seminar juxtaposes three fundamental lines of work related to the politics of collaborative practices in the field of images: the audiovisual production of new imaginaries, the participatory experiences they undergo upon reception and a pedagogy of the collective image.

Overshadowed by the orthodox histories of the avant-garde, the figure of María Blanchard has several aspects that have resulted in her being relegated to a secondary, and decidedly minor, position. These aspects include her condition as a woman and her distance from the prevailing cubist grammars. At this seminar Eugenio Carmona, Carmen Bernárdez, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Xon de Ros and María José Salazar present some new frameworks for better understanding the artist and, at the same time, the historical avant-gardes.

The Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain is a research initiative by Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Banco Santander and YGBArt (Rosina Gómez-Baeza and Lucia Ybarra). Conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, its purpose is to engage in a critical diagnosis of the Spanish art scene, viewed from a variety of standpoints and bringing together many different voices.

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.

Eric Andersen (Antwerp, 1940) has been linked to Fluxus from practically the very beginning. In 1962, he had the idea of organising a festival in Copenhagen's Nikolai Church. Before that he was involved in setting up art-poetry networks throughout Europe. His participation in this Festum Fluxorum, as the most public and festive qualities of Fluxus were known, was the beginning of a long collaboration in an array of Fluxus events that continue to this day.

This round table brings together the team of curators behind the exhibition Encounters with the 1930s (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2012 - 7 January 2013), to give the audience the chance to learn about the research process and the dialogue that have arisen from this dynamic rereading of the 1930s, which reveals the links between the temporary exhibition and a broader reinstallation project involving the Museum's Collection, undertaken to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.

This seminar aims to reflect on new emerging political coordinates and their meaning in a globalised world. Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano and Ignacio Castro address these questions through different critical and diagnostic notions developed in recent political philosophy.

This seminar brings together Juan Manuel Bonet, Fernando Castro Flórez and José Díaz Cuyás, with the idea of questioning the construction of the recent narrations of the last few decades of art in Spain. The seminar engages in a critique of the interpretations of Nacho Criado as an artist focused on the idea of the collapse of language and on the idea of art.

A lecture by Anne Wagner, a professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of California. In the conference she puts forward a guide to the cosmos of artist Rosemarie Trockel, setting out from the study of a number of recent works in relation to the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: a cosmos.

This symposium brings together a group of art historians whose work is known for its interdisciplinary approach, its innovative methodology and its relevance in meditating on the way we think about, write about and imagine art history today.

Presentation of the book La abeja y el economista (The Bee and the Economist), by Yann Moulier Bountang, co-editor of the magazine Multitudes and professor of political economy. He is one of the main people responsible for the design theory on the critique of the political economy of cognitive capitalism.

This activity sees artist Sharon Hayes enter into dialogue with Beatriz Preciado, coordinator of the seminar Somateca, and students from the Critical Practices Programme, as well as the general public with an interest in the subject. The encounter marks the start of an individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo, entitled Habla.

This event looks at the career of Raúl Zurita in a debate and then a poetry reading, both of which will take place in the Collection room dedicated to artistic activism in Latin America. This activity is also a presentation of the book Zurita, which have as a backdrop the military coup in Chile.

Rachel Haidu, professor at the University of Rochester (New York), debates the importance of staging, dramatic narration and the role of the actor in James Coleman’s work and in that of other artists influenced by his slide-tape works. This conference marks the start of the individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo.

This seminar comprises some of the diverse research projects that have emerged in recent years and are geared towards questioning the hegemonic narratives that envelop the complex process of Spain’s transition to democracy. It is the outcome of a collaboration between the Museo and Brumaria.

In this talk, Haacke and the art critic and historian Walter Grasskamp look at several decades of this dialectic of tension between the artist and the museums. The dialogue consists of a diachronic examination of the artist's fifty years of production, by looking at ten works commented in relation to their different institutional models and contexts.

This first session of Somatheque. Biopolitical production, feminisms, queer and trans practices explores the changes in the governmental methods of body production and of sexual difference that took place after World War II, with the transformation of war techniques into techniques of somatic production and communication.

Sound situation: Aural Drift is a program of activities focusing on the connection between sound and drift, psychogeography and aurality, including the anthropological level and the analysis and discussion of the influence and repercussions of situationist concepts (drift, construction of situations anddétournement) in the area of sound production.

This seminar intends to build a constellation of critical gazes regarding modern art in Latin America. It hopes to serve as the critical substratum that will help shape plans for the exhibition of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) of modern art that Museo will be organizing in 2013.

This conference presents recent examples of the work of the Radical Education collective, whose research deals with political imagination in art. The research process they put forward includes collective translations of Marx’s A Worker’s Inquiry, with the aim of questioning new modulations and regulations of work.

The public presentation of the Julián Díaz Sánchez research residency. This project analyses Spanish Informalism in relation to the exhibition New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, held in New York’s MoMA in 1960.

Reactivate/reinterpret brings together a varied group of specialists from different fields with the idea of analysing the place of performative practices within the realm of contemporary art museums. The series is comprised of various public lectures, workshops with the students of the Study Centre and two art interventions, by Jerôme Bel and Falke Pisano.

This presentation by Ángel González, Eva Rivas, José Luis Gallero and José María Parreño explores the life and work - inseparable from one another - of Quico Rivas. Cómo escribir de pintura sin que se note [How to write about painting without anybody noticing] is the name of a collection of critical texts written by the critic in the final years of his life.

This activity is divided into two sessions: a conference and guided visit through the rooms devoted to the Spanish Republic Pavilion. Both endeavour to contrast and draw connections between three exhibitions presented in Munich, Paris and New York in 1936 and 1937 in order to analyse the footprints of post-war art and the Museo’s Collection.

At this round table, the artist, theorists and project participants debate the exhibition Entre/Between, from its narrative components up through its spatial arrangement and the way it speaks to the public.

Guernica, a testimony and condemnation of the bombing by Franco's forces of the Basque town of the same name is considered a foundational work of 20th century art and it continues to be a universal symbol of the struggle against oppression. Its arrival in Madrid in September of 1981 was presented as the symbolic conclusion of Spain's transition to democracy following the dictatorship. The complicated diplomatic negotiations undertaken to bring about the painting's move were also the first important steps in cultural policy to be taken by the country's new government, and they highlighted the role that avant-garde art would play in the official culture of Spain's young democracy. With its arrival, it ceased to be the emblem of dissidence against the dictatorship and became the symbol of the healing of the fracture between the two historical factions in Spain: a sign of the reconciliation upon which the new democratic society would be based.

In this concert, Morton Subotnick is accompanied by the visual artist Lillevan, a frequent collaborator of musicians on the experimental music scene, who will offer a visual interpretation of Subotnick's music. The concert will feature pieces from Silver Apples Of The Moon (1967) and from another one of his pioneering albums, A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur (1978).

Five hundred years into the invention of America, and two hundred years after the birth of the first Latin American republics, a question appears, like an inescapable shadow, hidden in the very name comprising these countries: Is it possible to think about a thing called Latin America? Is it even possible to think of it as a unit that can be grasped? Evidently, the answer is no. However, the main issue eludes this contradiction inasmuch as the name given to this part of the world calls for general reflections that encompass the whole and also multiple reflections that go further and take into account particular questions relevant to each geographical area.

The art critic and independent curator Santiago Olmo has a conversation with the artist Soledad Sevilla about the exhibition Written in the celestial bodies, a site-specific installation at Palacio de Cristal in Madrid's Parque del Retiro.

Comprised of a guided visit to the exhibition Fragments of memory, with commentary by the artist, followed by a colloquium with the audience, this workshop seeks to articulate both languages, that of the visible and that of the verbal, that of the artist and that of the audience or that of the exhibition and that of debate, as keys to understanding Elena Asins' work.

The exhibition Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel, is about the legacy of Raymond Roussel, one of the lateral histories of modern art. In this conversation, the exhibition's curators discuss the keys to understanding the poetic universe of Raymond Roussel and his significance in artistic modernism.

In a lecture entitled René Daniëls revisited, the art critic Dominic van den Boogerd discusses some of the recurring themes found in Daniëls' oeuvre: his fascination for the picture as a "fleece" and for painting as a play of appearances and disappearances.

The book Rethinking Dramaturgy. Errancy and Transformation is the product of the First International Seminar on New Dramaturgies (Centro Párraga, 2009). Its presentation in the Museo marks the beginning of the academic year in the Master’s in Performing Arts Practices and Visual Culture in the Study Centre.

At the end of 1950, Jorge Oteiza concluded his investigations in the field of sculpture but, far from fading away, his aesthetic interests continued in a different sphere, one previously unexplored by him: film.

This conversation serves as an introduction to the largest retrospective to be held to date on the Italian artist. alighiero boetti. game plan is co-produced by Tate Modern (London), MoMA (New York) and the Museo, and is curated by Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey and Christian Rattemeyer.

Once again the Conference on Computer and Electronic Music offers a series of workshops on sound production and post-production, concerts dedicated to the aural perception of space and to live improvisation and sound projection, as well as a series of reflections, in a conversation and round table, about the artistic possibilities of radio and a fresh look at the Museum Collection from a new perspective, the auditory sphere.

Migraciones escénicas is the second stage of a project on research in the performing arts, organised by Artea in collaboration with international groups in Germany, Brazil, Chile, Slovenia and Turkey.