Live Arts

Implied in the very name Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is the Museum’s dedication to offering programs that enrich its exhibitions through Live Arts performances (Theater, Music, Dance and Performance Art.)

The Museum aims to offer these kinds of performances, which for their very nature are not welcomed in more conventional spaces. Keeping in mind the overlapping borders among different artistic disciplines today, the Museum’s objective is not to become just another performing arts space in the city, but to provide a platform for creating, experimenting and innovating in the Live Arts milieu, a mission directly related to the Museum’s theoretical discourse.

Likewise, the Museum collaborates with leading festivals for contemporary theater and creative dance in Spain in order to welcome representations from these festivals into its space, foster continuous dialogue with all of them and participate in forming their own discourses.

Ines Doujak. Eviva Il Cotello (Lang lebe das Messer), 2010.

Ines Doujak, Eviva Il Cotello (Lang lebe das Messer)

Date: September 2
Location: Nouvel Building, Room 001
Time: 19:30

Ines Doujak's performance Eviva Il Cotello (Lang lebe das Messer) intervenes the exhitibion space and discoursive realm of the The Potosí Principle. How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land? exhibition as an element which distrupts the space, while at the same time it extends the reference points and transversal readings posited by the show.

A dressed-up countertenor is reading a large book and singing phrases from "Confessionario para los curas de Indios. Con la instrucion contra sus ritos, y exhortacion para ayudar a bien morir", a book published in Lima in 1585, and an important element within the bio-political power structure which was being imposed in the New World. Where the curatorial statement of "Principio Potosí" locates the colonization of Latin America as the starting point of globalization and modern Capitalism, here Ines Doujak establishes equally transversal reference points: from the New World to the Old World, from the "Confessionario para los curas de Indios…" to the witch hunts in Europe, from the castrati that entertained Philip II to the Baroque music that Jesuits made Bolivian people listen to in order to civilize them.


In her work, Ines Doujak examines the norms of human behaviour as structural and constituent elements of society from a decidedly feminist perspective. Her production is located in the complex context of artistic production and political agitation, relating discourses across the public and private realms and in the field of socio-economic production and the private sphere of desire. She has had solo exhibitions at the Salzburg Kunstverein (2005), at the Vienna Secession (2002), and has taken part in collective exhibitions at the Witte de With (2004), MACBA (2005), or the Exnergasse Kunsthalle (2005), as well as the recent Documenta XII in Kassel (2007). She is one of the artists participating in the exhibition The Potosí Principle. How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land?.