Activities

Once again, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the annual celebration of International Museum Day (IMD) with two open days and a selection of activities that aim to take a deeper look at the dialogue between the collections and the public, as well as reinforcing the idea of the museum as a space for non-disciplinary education and collective learning.

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.

As part of the Intervalos programme, Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s latest work is screened, with both film-makers also participating at an encounter. Joining film practices based on found footage, documentary and experimental cinema, Pays Barbare is a complex tale about historical memory, fascism and colonialism.

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 Association of Dance Professionals in the Madrid Community and the Cultural Association for Dance, together with the Museum, have organized a total of 10 performances with different dance styles coexisting alongside plastic arts.

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.

The Museo welcomes the choreographer and dancer Simone Forti. The encounter is made up of a conversation between Forti and Tania Arias, with a presentation in the Nouvel Auditorium Hall of the results of some of the work produced by students in the workshop run by Forti in La Casa Encendida.

Cinema is a privileged medium in the narrative construction of biography, yet, in the face of narcissism from the mythologies of self, this film series shows life in its temporary form, both fragile and precarious, and presents a programme that spans from Neorealism to recent post-colonial cinema.

This is the premiere of the film-maker’s most recent production, which coincides with the exhibition and film program devoted to his work. Shot in one single take, Ana Arabia demonstrates the utopian coexistence of a community of Jews and Muslims as they withstand urban speculation.

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.

Portuguese choreographer Cláudia Dias presents her latest composition, Vontade de Ter Vontade, a solo inspired by two works by the writers and thinkers Tony Judt and Boaventura de Sousa Santos. Through this piece Dias prolongs her work on identity and territory.

A workshop based on the technique created by the Portuguese artist João Fiadeiro. Composition in Real Time is a method of investigation on different forms of encounter, and its use perpetually aims to be in relation with the other. Its utopia is collective experience, being together, whether in a social or artistic context.

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.

With a filmography that contains theatrical parody and documentary realism in equal proportions, Kaurismäki’s cinema is based on the paradoxes and fault lines of contemporaneity. This retrospective, the first to be held in a modern art museum, is complemented by a master class and a carte blanche program chosen by the filmmaker. 

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.

The cinema of Amos Gitai is that of an architect-filmmaker, but it is also that of a biographer-filmmaker. Organised in connection with the exhibition The Biographies of Amos Gitai, this series spans over 30 years of activity and points to the historical strata underlying the conflict between Israel and Palestine.   

AIDS Anarchive began within the framework of the 2012-2013 research residencies at Museo Reina Sofía, as part of the production process of a “counter-archive” or an anarchive of AIDS policies, with attention being paid for the first time to practices occurring outside of the Anglo-Saxon or Western and Central European settings.

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.

This audiovisual series looks at the 1980s, and that decade’s prolongation into the 1990s, as a genealogy of much of the dialectics that explain contemporary, as a time period and cultural category.

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 year the Mexican dance company Tumakat presents, in connection with Latin American art, the work Maravillosa at the Museum. This chamber piece is an exercise in reflection on the nature of dance as spectacle. Using humour, Federica Folco, from Uruguay, and Josie Cáceres, from Ecuador, have created a piece about the questioning of limits.

In recent years, it has been pointed out that one of the identifying features of Spanish alternative film is the exploration of the real.

Acoustic Space began in 2010 as a way for the Museum to make a place in its programming for the wide range of currents in today's heterogeneous musical scene.  This time the series features a selection of artists who have released, all of them, a new album in 2013: Kalabrese, Helado Negro, Carmen Villain, Amateur Best and Emika. 

News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital (2008) is one of the most complex and monumental films of recent film history. Throughout the almost nine hours that the film lasts, its director, Alexander Kluge (Germany, 1932), offers his own construction of Eisenstein's unfinished project of filming Capital by Karl Marx, an idea conceived after a feverish encounter between the Russian filmmaker and James Joyce in 1927.

This audiovisual series looks at Salvador Dalí's film, video and television production, as a culmination of the exhibition Dalí. All of the poetic suggestions and all of the plastic possibilities. Almost five hours in length, this collection of works, with repeat screenings over two days, argues that the relationship between Dalí and mass culture is key to understanding the artist's work, but also to developing a different idea of modernity, one that conveys the spectacular and tumultuous nature of 1930s modernity. 

This summer film series explores one of the contemporary cinematographies that, although very interesting, is among the least distributed in Europe. Midway between new auteur voices and the poetics of documentary, this series shows how film responds to a situation of provisionality and how it imagines the future from the vantage point of uncertainty.

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.