Activities

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

This encounter reflects on the formation of a new type of European political and cultural agency following the exhaustion of a union based on the market economy and on the precarious geopolitical balance of the States.

Part of the ARCOmadrid International Contemporary Art Fair, this meeting will bring together professionals from museums and private collections around the theme Private collecting and common heritage: proposals for a discussion.

The author of a variety of works that are barely known by the Spanish-speaking world, the Brazilian Boris Kossoy is one of the key historians in the recent approaches to photography. His work, now in Spanish translation for the first time, places this medium between the historical document and the art object.

This activity presents the research conducted by Pulska Grupa, a Croatian collective of architects and urban planners who have been research residents at Museo Reina Sofía in 2012-2013.

This activity brings together a group of writers and theorists representative of the return to the essay as a type of writing that is both prospective and interrogative.

This event serves as an introduction to the exhibition Biographical forms with a lecture by its curator, Jean-François Chevrier, followed by a colloquium with two of the artists represented.

This project is conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, the aim of which is generate proposals based on a critical diagnosis of the contemporary art system in Spain.

With the participation of Armando Montesinos, Mariano Navarro and Juan Pablo Wert, this activity presents the exhibition Idea: Painting-Force. 

Through the gaze of three curators, this lecture series inquires into different topics such as feminism, video dance and the diversity of languages present during these years.

In this performative lecture, in parallel with the presentation of Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and Globalisation: artistic practices during the 80s and 90s, Mullican reviews and comments on some of his performances under hypnosis, in which he recreates, as he does in his visual works, the logic of an unstable and irrational world.

This series of three seminars is an interuniversity partnership project based on the collaborative work of a diverse group of researchers. The debate platform, with the participation of the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, the Universidad de Navarra and the Museo Reina Sofía, analyses art education at a time in which academic teaching hovers between the creative industry and the specificity of the artist's role.

At this lecture, organised by Fundación de los Comunes and MACBA, Michael Hardt puts the concept of the common at the centre of a renewed contemporary political project.

This event is part of the Museo Reina Sofía master lectures series, a public program that began in 2010 as an attempt to better understand the methodological tensions that have transformed art history in recent years. At the same time, the annual master lecture serves as the inauguration to the Museum's academic year, which consists of numerous activities related to its multiple University master's programs, independent study programs, debate forums and research residencies. In addition to these initiatives, this public activity introduces a new facet of the contemporary museum: a place for training and research.  

Film on the margins, from the peripheries, and the other cinema are among the terms used to refer to works that have been made outside the industry in recent years in Spain. Beyond this condition of existence, a number of additional criteria are fulfilled by these films, suggesting something of a group identity. More specifically: independent production and distribution platforms, the incorporation of the experimental language used in the field of art (exhibition video and film) and the liberal use of documentary techniques in the form of essay film are some of the features found throughout this other cinema.

This international event, which brings together researchers, artists and curators from both sides of the Atlantic, seeks to stimulate reflection about the notion of avant-garde in relation to the experience and discourse of modernity between 1920 and 1970.

Copylove is a research project begun in 2012 by Rubén Martínez, Txelu Balboa and Sofía Coca that attempts to analyse and represent the relationships and tensions that arise between the commons and love within communities, between emotions and community links. 

At this program, the curators Julia Robinson and Christian Xatrec present the premises of the exhibition ± I96I. Founding the Expanded Arts, followed by an intervention by Simone Forti in the auditorium and concluding with the representation of several of her pieces in the exhibition galleries. 

French sociologist Laurent Bonelli investigates the economic insecurity, riots and police repression that define the backdrop of the existence of a large part of the youth in the banlieu, the metropolitan outskirts of France. This conference questions and analyzes the creation of the new frontiers (spatial and moral) of an emerging social order and the resistance it generates. 

In this performative lecture, artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the realm of ecosexuality as an expanded field of queer politics. The ecosexual community is a rapidly growing community that includes artists, academics, sex workers and other entities from diverse walks of life. 

When trying to understand the impact that artistic practices have on the public sphere, people usually speak of a confrontation between art and politics. In this seminar, comprised of a lecture and a workshop, Brian Holmes takes a step beyond this dichotomy, and situates art, once again, in relation to existential affections, forms of organisation, bodies and theory. 

In this conference, Anglo-American historian Peter Linebaugh explores the cycle of municipal occupations and urban encampments of recent years in cities including Cairo, Athens, London, New York and Madrid. Rather than discuss such events within discourses of citizenship or the public, Linebaugh considers them within the historical framework of the commons.

The new direction taken by political and social happenings in recent years has once again made public space an excellent place for manifestations by the community. In contrast with the situation during the last third of the 20th century, dissident action does not avoid urban spectacularization, hiding in private or clandestine spheres. Instead it transforms and is shown in public space. This seminar explores the use of “theatrical” gestures, behaviours and performances in social space for the purpose of expressing disagreement and dissidence, and it also examines the way that today's art, specifically theatre, has taken in and dialogued with these non-artistic theatricalities.

Three mysterious occurrences in a city haunted by images, of people known to me, and others unknown. Images abandoned by their occupants; some have become ruins. An image is invaded, a new face moves in—sometimes an ally, sometimes an old foe. One vanishes, while another travels from one picture to another

Rabih Mroué.

Closely connected to the Computing Centre, the visual poet, experimental artist, researcher, professor and writer Ignacio Gómez de Liaño is one of the essential references in Spanish art in the 1970s. This book of memories recounts that period's most important events and describes many of their protagonists. The book, the Spanish title of which is En la red del tiempo 1972 -1977, constitutes an indispensable document in any effort to understand contemporary art practices in the final years of the dictatorship.

This post-graduate course, associated with the research project "After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art from 1931 to 1981" (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation HAR2011-25864), is conceived as an introduction to the evolution, creation, promotion and historiographic fate of Spanish art, in times of peace and war and both within and outside the country, over a period of five decades. The period examined spans the Republic, the Civil War and dictatorship-exile.

The main purpose of universities is generally understood to revolve around teaching and research, but these institutions also have other important roles that tend to receive less attention. This event looks at the architectural and artistic heritage belonging to Spain's National University of Distance Education (UNED). The collection is brought together for the first time in this publication, which examines how contemporary art has been collected, exhibited and supported by the university as an institution.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault suggested that for each model of power there was a specific way of organising sexuality and reproduction and that this organisation was concentrated in institutions such as the school, the hospital or the factory. All of these are now in decline, so we must ask ourselves: What model of somatopolitial administration characterises contemporary neoliberal society, following the crisis occurring in Foucault's clinic? This lecture is the inaugural event of Somatheque 2013.

This program aims to explore the notion of avant-garde as it relates to the experience of modernity and to the shaping of the political and aesthetic vanguardia by post-war art and politics between 1920 and 1970. The specific nature of avant-garde and neo avant-garde practices, and the way in which transnational dialogue helped delineate artistic discourses in Spain and Latin America, will be the reflections guiding this event.

The recent 40th anniversary of the book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From object art to concept art) affords an excellent opportunity to analyse the trajectory of a book that is both a history and a manifesto of the new artistic practices in the 1970s.

This lecture looks at the interaction between narrations of social and economic recession and narrations of the visual arts crisis since the 1960s. Do these stories take place in parallel or are they a form of cultural critique? How does the economic recession shape the perception and production of contemporary art? Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford University and is also editor of the New Left Review.