Activities

There is no possible separation between art and life with Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1928). She was an active member in the critical art scene during the Vietnam War in the 1960s in New York, where she was also connected to minimalism, happenings and pop art. In 1973, she returned to Japan, extending the boundaries of her work. Her heterogeneous production ranges from collage to musical compositions, design, novels and installation art. Kusama obsessively develops the idea of repetition and screentone, covering surfaces with polka dots, creating what she calls ‘infinity nets’, one of her trademarks.

Encounters is a programme with which the Museo looks to generate debate on its scheduled exhibitions. Temporarily coinciding with the public opening of the exhibitions, a dialogue is initiated between artists, curators, critics and historians in order to look ahead to and question the lines and set-up of each exhibition project.

This film highlights the invisibility of global labour even in the process of production. The sea, writes Allan Sekula, is forgotten until disaster strikes. The sea, formerly the object of romantic imagination, is examined from a new angle, that of the transport of merchandise in times of globalisation.

The artistic team PSJM, a duo formed by Cynthia Viera and Pablo San José based in Berlin, presents La Isla de Hidrógeno, a book in which a well-structured bunch of solid characters comes together in different organically related stories. The authors of the book will be joined by Miguel Cereceda, José Luis Corazón and Jesús Carrillo.

The Critical Practices Seminar aims to nurture students’ capacity for critical judgement and encourage the adoption of a standpoint through the profound knowledge of currents of contemporary thought. The seminar is structured around the reading and analysis of documents and materials submitted by each of the participating professors.

This gathering of writers and publishers is an opportunity to look at the forms of minor literature, from spaces such as Quebec, Montreal or Tangiers. Sonia García Soubriet, Jesús Egido and Madeleine Monette dialogue about landscapes of seduction and about literature as a universe of noise and silence, urban labyrinths and private refuges.

This seminar aims to show the variety and complexity in some of the debates on contemporary Spanish history. To this end, it compiles the latest research on aspects such as exhibitions, urbanism, magazines, photography and the relationship with totalitarian regimes and their outcome in the Spanish Civil War and Second World War.

Jorge Ribalta, curator of the exhibition The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939, exercises a first attempt in this presentation of the historical documentation of the worker photography movement. Beyond formulating an examination of artists and unique works, his aim is to recount the constitution of public spaces through the medium of photography.

In his book Expresionismo. El lenguaje y construcción de la forma arquitectónica, Javier Climent argues that there is another history behind functionalism, one that reflects the legacy of the Expressionist tradition in Modernism. The book shows the less uniform side of functionalism, in which expressionism and organicism blend with rationalism.

Although they span the area between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, the film and audiovisual activities of José Val del Omar have taken place in the territory of myth. Myth as something situated outside of history, that only leads to cult status.

The film representation of the Spanish Civil War and its victims has changed over the different historical periods between 1936 and today.

Encounters with the 1930s is a symposium that begins with a line of questions about a decade that has haunted historic and contemporary ideas about art and politics, artistic autonomy, and the pressure of context on artistic production.

This seminar is divided into four roundtables that attempt to interrogate the historical and intellectual coordinates of Warburg’s project, and then to discuss the primary questions about the nature of the image formulated in Atlas that resonate in current debates.

This book, edited by Fernando Estévez González and Mariano de Santa Ana, seeks to broaden the debate regarding archives, taking it beyond its usual reduction to such technical and operational aspects. Derived from two seminars, this publication offers a space for critical reflection, starting with different epistemological presuppositions and theoretical orientations.

Co-occurring with the public opening of the exhibition Desire Rises from Collapse, an encounter is presented between Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby and Ana Longoni, art historian and curator of the exhibition. The conversation looks ahead to and questions the lines and set-up of the exhibition project.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a conversation will take place between the artist Dorit Margreiter, Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Lynne Cooke, the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of the Museo.

The first Spanish-language publication of Atlas Mnemosyne, a decisive work in art historiography and the source of important trends in methodology, from Panofsky's iconology to the modern discipline of Visual Studies, serve as the framework for this debate on its author, Aby Warburg.

El sistema del arte en España contributes to a better understanding of how the Spanish context has entered the international art system. It also contributes to forging intellectual paradigms that help describe the functioning of the new art systems appearing in other, emerging countries.

A seminar aimed at reconsidering the contemporary condition of the spectator, attempting to look over parallels that have often been drawn between audiences and society, as well as reflecting on the forms of participation that have subverted the simplistic dichotomies of identification and critical distance.

The Limits of Cinema is a series of screenings, meetings and debates designed to provide a space to reflect on the nature of the cinema, its boundaries and its interactions with other forms of expression.

Georges Didi-Huberman, the curator of the exhibition Atlas. How to carry the world on one's back?, introduces the implications of narrating history based upon the "survival" of images and how the anachronism is integrated into the exhibition of art, using analysis of and references to the ideas of Aby Warburg. 

A concert and screening by C. Raman Schlemmer via the work undertaken by Oskar Schlemmer as the director of the Bauhaus performing arts workshop. The Bauhaus dances engage in an intimate dialogue with the spatial ideas of Walter Gropius and the experiments of Kandinsky, Klee and Itten on colour and form.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Bruce Conner (Kansas, 1933-San Francisco, 2008) worked in nearly every medium of the fine arts.

The research residencies inside the Study Centre look to integrate the Museo’s visitors and workspaces and the university, bringing research time into the museum context and the relationship capacity within the academic sphere. The results of this first edition are presented in successive presentations with diverse formats.

This conference and screening explores the changes taking place in social formations and their contexts, revolving around the work of artist Yael Bartana (Israel, 1970). His work sheds light on the various forms of new communities and redefinitions of the idea of belonging.

This encounter looks at the research that stems from the exhibition : VAL DEL OMAR Overflow. Eugeni Bonet, curator of the exhibition, and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, assistant curator, present the results of work linked to the exhibit that is based on the attempts to reconstruct non-existent techniques and the recovery of unreleased work by the film-maker from Granada.

To mark the occasion of the exhibition Miralda. De gustibus non disputandum (24 June -11 October 2010), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is presenting three video programmes by the artist Antoni Miralda (Tarrasa, 1942) that explain his view of art in the context of the exhibition.

This presentation explores some of the themes addressed in the last issue of Archivos de la Filmoteca, a periodical published by the Generalitat Valenciana Film Institute. The aim of this publication is to examine Guernica in the light of visual culture studies and their relationship with cinema and photography as mass communication media.

Drift is Ours is a workshop of experience, reflection and debate from the perspective of pedagogy and modern utopia based in Latin America, linked to the exhibition project Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, Journeys and Morphologies. The event will consist in three workshops led by activists, architects, geographers, poets and town planners.

This series of conferences and screenings analyse, from the 1970s onwards, the creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces, particularly in the Lower Manhattan area of New York. The debates delve deeper into photographic projects and performances, along with screenings of films and videos, to reveal a version of the city that greatly differs from the official one.

During the 1970s, a time of intensive de-industrialisation and the transition to an information economy in New York, artists found new ways to use the city. The creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces intensified, especially in Lower Manhattan, which was becoming a centre of the commercial art world. Action Behind the Margins combines debates, performances pieces and film screenings to reveal a city where public and private spheres intermingle and marginal subjects assert their right to the city.

Since the 1950s, Spain has been home to an important tradition of experimental film cut off from conventional exhibition spaces. This series was designed to give this unknown branch of film the visibility it deserves. From more than a thousand films, forty-three were chosen to be screened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in six sessions. In order to spark a dialogue between the different eras, this vastly diverse group of seminal films was shown out of chronological order, blazing a trail through the almost unknown history of Spanish cinema.

Transitland: video art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009 is a project put together to mark the occasion of the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It includes a selection of one hundred works produced between 1989 and 2009 that reflect the political, social and personal transformations that occurred in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.

Singular Multitude: The Art of Resistance is an ambitious series that includes conferences, a performance piece and a selection of audiovisual works that reflect the desire of their creators to investigate the unlimited possibilities found on the edges of official taste and the socio-political circumstances of the present day, all while recalling events, revealing traumas, mediating memory and producing counterimages in contemporary society and art.

Visionaries - Audiovisual Works in Latin America is an eclectic exhibition that is full of vitality and deeply committed to audiovisual creation in Latin America. The series looks at Latin American experimental video and film from Mexico to the countries of the Southern Cone in a combination of screenings and conferences that put everything from pioneers in experimental film to more recent productions under the historical lens. Organised by Brazil’s Instituto Itaú Cultural, the series consists of 73 works grouped into nine programmes.

Fragments of the East. Performance Art and Feminist Discourse (1968-1989) is a video and conference series on the origin of feminist discourse in the artistic practice in three historical contexts with no public sphere. As artists beginning within the framework of the communist dictatorships of Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Poland, Geta Brătescu (Ploiesti, 1926), Sanja Iveković (Zagreb, 1929) and Ewa Partum (Grodzisk, 1945) created works that question artistic specificity and autonomy at the same time that they allude to repressive contexts and the subject’s capacity for transformation and representation in works of art.

New York, February 1963. Jack Smith (Columbus, 1932 - New York, 1989), Tony Conrad (Concord, 1940), and Henry Flynt (Greensboro, 1940) protest outside the Met, MoMA and Lincoln Center carrying signs that read: “Demolish Serious Culture! Demolish Art Museums! Demolish Concert Halls!” “Making art was never supposed to be easy. It really has to be very boring. It must become very, very boring.”

Why not short films? is a series of screenings and a roundtable designed to put the spotlight on the short film format, a form that reveals the new relationships that artists and filmmakers have with the audiovisual medium and the world around them from the perspective of young, mainly Spanish creators who have come to short films from the cinema. The Great Ways agency, a specialist in cultural events for twelve years, collaborated on the selection.

In 1984, a group of students in the city of Bonn founded the Videonale, a video festival that reflected the creative possibilities of the medium. After more than 20 years, this festival has become one of the most important and innovative international events dedicated to contemporary video. Despite its age, the Videonale remains faithful to its principles: the free participation of artists in the competition with a single-channel piece made during the two years before the call for entries, its international character, and selection by a jury of independent international experts.

Film or cinematic essays - not to be confused with art-house cinema - is the film correlative to the long tradition of the literary essay. These films do not offer a dramatic narrative (like fictional films) or a representation of the historical world (like documentaries), but are a reflection on the medium. This programme constitutes the first presentation in Spain (and one of the first in Europe) of one of the least codified practices in the contemporary audiovisual field. The films selected make it possible to characterise the film essay and observe its evolution over the last decade by comparing works by filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard (Paris, 1930), the artist who has done the most to popularise this form, and Mariano Llinás (Buenos Aires, 1975); personal documentary makers like Ross McElwee (North Carolina, 1947) and Albertina Carri (Buenos Aires, 1973); avant-garde filmmakers such as Barbara Hammer (Hollywood, 1939) and Angela Melitopoulos (Munich, 1961); and video artists like Shelly Silver (New York, 1957), Sean Snyder (Virginia Beach, 1972) and Deborah Stratman (Washington, D.C., 1967).

No Coverage (the title alludes to the proliferation of Arab television channels over the last few decades and how they have chosen to ignore the production of independent video, thus leaving it literally with no coverage) brings together independent experimental videos and documentaries by artists in order to shake up, discredit and reconstruct the limits of experimental video and documentaries in the Middle East. Comprised of videos that include autobiographical stories, testimonial interviews, archive footage and socio-political topics, the goal of the programme is to put Middle East independent video practices into context and explore the characteristics of their evolution. Although it is difficult to precisely define what constitutes ‘independent video’ and ‘experimental documentary’ in the region, the programme shows clearly that both encompass a broad spectrum of aesthetic perspectives and forms.

Contemporary Madness was designed to clear up the hazy boundary separating the reality of perception from the rules of exception, featuring audiovisual creations that present the darker areas of the social order and the human mind using non-fiction and documentary work done in Spain. The works show the invisibility of the limits established by the discourses sanctioned by civil ordinances and medical and political convention.