Held on 09 sep 2017
As a culmination of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter with the artist Franz Erhard Walther (Fulda, 1939), featuring the participation of Elena Filipovic, Christian Rattemeyer and João Fernandes. The conversation also serves as an accompaniment to a series of activations performed by Walther.
The title of this lecture alludes to How to Do Things with Words, the influential book by the language philosopher J. L. Austin, published in 1962. In this study, Austin defines a type of sentence he calls “performative”, whereby “saying” something implies “doing” something. In other words, an utterance is an action. This performative aspect is explained through language’s capacity to travel beyond description or observation to produce a determined reality, with such a reflection having a major influence on numerous contemporary artists, among them the unique Franz Erhard Walther.
Walther’s artistic practice departs from the static and solid idea of sculpture as he develops a series of objects made primarily from organic and textile materials and activated by the viewer’s own action. Activation is a process which inter-relates the body, artistic object, time and space to produce a work which is inseparable from the notion of participation. A sculpture, conventionally understood as a free-standing object, is redefined as a public, collective and temporary event. As in J. L. Austin’s text on language and action, for Walther the meaning of a sculpture cannot be separated from its use.
Although the artist’s work bears a relation to different artistic events in the 1960s and 1970s, it always stands equidistant from them. For instance, the investigation into the artistic object and viewers’ experience which brings him closer to minimalism; his interest in the connection between language, action and conceptual art; the use of organic materials and the importance placed on the process, and on Povera Art. This encounter, therefore, is articulated around these points of contact and distinguishes between different axes and lines of work. With that in mind, Elena Filipovic will address the relationship between the artist, the body and dance; Christian Rattemeyer will consider the relationship between abstraction and painting; and João Fernandes will approach the figure of Walther, setting out from his research into language.
In collaboration with
The Franz Erhard Walther Foundation
Sponsorship
illycaffèParticipants
Franz Erhard Walther. German artist. He participated in documenta 5, 6, 7 and 8 (1972, 1977, 1982 and 1987), and his work has been exhibited in numerous solo shows in institutions such as MoMA, New York (1970), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1977), Kunstverein St. Gallen (1980), Berlin’s Nationalgalerie (1981), Stedelijk Van Abbenmuseum, Eindhoven (1984 and 1993), Hamburg’s Kunsthalle (1991 and 2013), Mamco, Geneva (1994 and 1997), Fundación Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2003), Mies van der Rohe Haus, Berlin (2009), WIELS in Brussels (2014), and The Power Plant, in Toronto (2016). In 1994 he was awarded the Piepenbrock Prize for Sculpture, and the Golden Lion in 2017 at the Venice Biennale.
Elena Filipovic. Director of Kunsthalle Basel. Between 2009 and 2014 she served as a curator at WIELS in Brussels, where she organised the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther: The Body Decides. She also co-curated the 5th Berlin Biennial with Adam Szymczyk, and has organised a range of exhibitions with emerging artists, for instance Marcel Duchamp, Alina Szapocznikow, Mark Leckey and Teresa De Keersmaeker, and different touring retrospectives. She is the author of The Apparently Marginal Activities of Marcel Duchamp (2016) and David Hammons, Bliz-aard Ball Sale (2017), and recently edited the publications Felix Gonzalez-Torres: Specific Objects Without Specific Form (2016) and The Artist as Curator: An Anthology (2017).
Christian Rattemeyer. An associate curator in the Department of Drawings at New York’s MoMA, he has organised exhibitions such as Lines, Grids, Stains, Words (Museo Serralves and Museo Wiesbaden, 2007) and Alighiero Boetti (Museo Reina Sofía and Tate Modern, 2012). He has also published widely on contemporary art and has edited the catalogues Exhibiting the New Art (2010) and Compass in Hand: Assessing Drawing Now (2009).
João Fernandes. Deputy director of the Museo Reina Sofía and curator of the exhibition Franz Erhard Walther. A Place for the Body.
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
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8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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Monday and Sunday - Check times
This guided tour activates the microsite Rethinking Guernica, a research project developed by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections Area, Conservation and Restoration Department and the Digital Projects Area of the Editorial Activities Department, assembling around 2,000 documents, interviews and counter-archives related to Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica (1937).
The visit sets out an in-situ dialogue between the works hung around the painting and a selection of key documents, selected by the Museo’s Education Team and essential to gaining an idea of the picture’s historical background. Therefore, the tour looks to contribute to activating critical thought around this iconic and perpetually represented work and seeks to foster an approach which refreshes our gaze before the painting, thereby establishing a link with the present. Essentially revisiting to rethink Guernica.
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The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
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