Activities

Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 - Cologne, 1976) is a key figure of contemporary art, and a reference point and driving force in many current discourses and practices. Following his initial work as a poet, journalist and photographer, in 1964 Broodthaers decided to become a visual artist, and from that moment on concerns with providing a response to the basic questions posed by visual arts can be discerned as he interrogated the idea of representation and the production of meaning through the use of existing knowledge systems. In this round-table discussion Christophe Cherix, Jean-François Chevrier, Dirk Snauwaert and Manuel Borja-Villel will debate the different readings around the founder of the fictional museum.

Dance, gender and nation, three closely bound concepts within the context of contemporary Western culture, and the thematic cornerstones of this seminar. The focal point is the period spanning the second third of the 20^th century - a period of upheaval in the aftermath of the economic crisis of 1929 and the rise of the totalitarianism that would trigger the outbreak of the Second World War shortly afterwards.

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 Intervalos (Intermissions) programme, which shows screenings of recent film work, presents a preview of Andrés Duque’s latest movie, Oleg and Strange Arts. The film moves between biography and performance, bearing witness, through moments in the life of Russian composer Oleg Karavaychuk (1927–2016), to the return of beauty that is at once eccentric, fragile and pathological.

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.

The open-air cinema is closely linked to summer holidays: a space and time where the working class is freed from work obligations and where the chance for enjoyment and leisure presents itself. This series, screened on the outdoor terraces of the Museo, offers a journey through the history of the medium, focusing on its relationship with the conception of holidaying, leisure, travel and tourism, through which a whole range of ideas and questions that surface at this intersection are analysed.

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.

Museo Reina Sofía presents this retrospective film-program dedicated to Cuban documentary movement around the Revolution, an Avant-garde episode in Latin America usually ignored. Together with the impulse to show a new reality and rethink the public function of the image, the documentary in Cuba merges the factual record with the aesthetics of shock and agitation of the montage, producing a unique visual manifesto.

Blank Paper Escuela puts forward BookJockey, an experimental format with which to show and enjoy photobooks. It involves a DJ session with contemporary photographic books, displaying and mixing materials to create a narrative which prompts the audience to perceive them differently.

To mark International Museum Day, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a piece awarded first prize in the 2015 Madrid Choreography Competition: the dance piece entitled …Eran casi las dos (…It Was Nearly Two O’clock), created by Carmen Fumero and Miguel Ballabriga.

On 18 May the Museo Reina Sofía will host a special programme to celebrate International Museum Day, held worldwide since 1977. The idea is to share a day of celebrations with visitors, who will be able to gain a better understanding of the lesser-known spaces and sides of the institution and feel part of its programme, exhibitions and working process.

Niño de Elche ofrece en el Museo Reina Sofía un concierto cuyo título, Animal Numero, se basa en los números que portaban en sus cuerpos los presos marroquíes de Guantánamo. Cuenta para el evento con la colaboración de los músicos Raúl Cantizano y Darío del Moral, y Benito Jiménez a cargo de las luces. 

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.

The Museo Reina Sofía once again takes part in the activities that mark International Dance Day, organising two sessions that aim to grant visibility to and assimilate inside its spaces an artistic practice that is becoming increasingly prominent in the Museo’s programming, lines of research and Collection.

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.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster employs literature to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and theatre to juxtapose an imaginary narrative of the present. This Intervalos session sees three of her films screened, including Otello 1887, a cinematic opera filmed in the Palacio de Cristal and co-produced by the Museo.

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.