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September 5, 2016
Table 1. Networks, nodes and contact zones for a non-aligned geopolitical order
After the Bandung Conference in 1955, the Non-aligned Movement offered an alternative to the bipolar division of the world imposed by the two superpowers: the United States and the Soviet Union. The attempt to search for another configuration of the world forged a union of peripheral nation states and inspired new cultural and artistic formations. Cold Atlantic will present transnational studies that grant visibility to collaboration networks initiated by artists, critics, curators and institutions, either in dialogue with the Non-Aligned Movement or inspired by it. The aim is to shed light on the internationalist culture that these alternative constellations helped consolidate, and the subversion of Cold War geographies that entailed such crossroads and entanglements.
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September 5, 2016
Table 2. Competing hegemonies
The collision between both superpowers brought a bilateral framework of aspirations and expectations to governments and opposing blocs that strived to be “modern”. A wide array of artistic practices and aesthetic discourses, often contradictory, stemmed from the negotiations between different notions of modernity, and circumstances and conditions in diverse local contexts. These states’ search for autonomy, sovereignty and progress was concurrent with the need for acknowledgement as members of a new geopolitical order. This session centres on a debate regarding the exchanges and confrontations that were entrenched in the struggle for cultural hegemony, under circumstances demarcated by the emergence of new geopolitical powers in the growing global context of the Cold War.
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September 6, 2016
Table 3. Resistance, dissidence and utopia(s)
In a world where imperialist and neo-colonial politics were imposed on both sides of the iron curtain, artistic practices provided ways to resists, subvert and combat them. This priority axis of Cold Atlantic aims to study vanguard and experimental artistic practices analyzing their aesthetic, political and social bases (and contexts), and their role as models for resistance against the normative culture(s) of the Cold War. Thus we seek to highlight the role of artistic production and cultural agents, operating in both, hegemonic and subaltern centers, as subversive tools in countercultural movements within the transatlantic axis, and to show their potential for imagining alternative forms of society.
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September 6, 2016
Table 4. Global order: Cold War and beyond
In 1967 the French philosopher Guy Debord interpreted the bipolar division of the world, Capitalism opposite Communism, as a global and interdependent system of total spectacle. Debord believed that complex geopolitical entanglements, and the repercussions in political, social and cultural spheres, hastened by the rapid development of media and economic networks, were evolving towards a unique totality which, by and large, has determined and given shape to the current global world. This session will analyse the dialogues and entanglements between artistic and cultural spheres during the Cold War and how they still endure in the present day. Therefore, it will look to analyse the impact of transatlantic configurations on the current global order, and on the transition of modernity to contemporaneity.
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September 7, 2016
Round table with the participants
Participants: Walter Mignolo, Andrea Giunta, Sarah Wilson and Jonathan Harris
Moderator: Serge Guilbaut
5:00-7:00 p.m.
Cold Atlantic
Cultural War, Dissident Artistic Practices, Networks and Contact Zones at the Time of the Iron Curtain
Held on 05, 06, 07 sep 2016
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 conference, which will be conducted through round-table discussions, lectures and dialogue, organised through an open international process, looks to recover relatively unstudied nodes of cultural influence and dissemination in its aim to decentralise the Paris-New York axis that still dominates and is ubiquitous in studies on the Cold War and its artistic incarnations, thus fostering discussion that grants a voice to the forms of cultural expression that materialised outside official power structures.
These dialogues and interactions will be analysed within a Cold War context, whilst also proceeding from the destabilisation of the status quo brought about by the Bandung Conference (1955) and the Hungarian Revolution (1956). Consequently, it underscores the forms of mediation, dissent and resistance that sought to offer alternative answers to the ideological and aesthetic split that defined the cultural and social climate after World War Two. The conference will call into question canonical narratives of artistic modernity by exploring transatlantic artistic networks, with a view to eliciting the plurality of the responses to the ideological positioning this war held on a cultural level. Therefore, from this perspective Cold Atlantic will chart a new cartography of artistic practices and institutional relations, both subjective and political.
The re-evaluation of crossroads and friction in artistic production, material culture and political resistance will help to reconsider different accounts of modern art’s struggle, displaying alternatives to the prevailing Western vision, whilst also calling attention to the links that would bring dissident responses to life in the geopolitical order of the Cold War, a key period in the configuration of today’s global world. Spain’s own “peripheral” position with regard to the UK, France and the United States opens up a space that fosters a reconsideration of the role of modern art, questioning accounts based on the concept of progress that have predominated the study of artistic modernity.
Scientific Committee
Paula Barreiro López, Fabiola Martínez Rodríguez, Chema González, Carlos Prieto del Campo, Olga Fernández López, Juan Albarrán, Julia Bailey, Andrea Giunta, Serge Guilbaut, Jonathan Harris and Jesús Carrillo
Within the framework of the research project
Decentralised Modernities: Art, Politics and Counterculture in the Transatlantic Axis during the Cold War (HAR2014-53834-P)
Associated activities
Predoctoral workshop at the University of Barcelona, 8 and 9 September 2016
Acknowledgements
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía, Saint Louis University, Universidad de Barcelona and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
In collaboration with
Organized by
![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)
Más actividades
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.
Rethinking Guernica
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.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
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?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
Situated Voices 36
Thursday, 16 October 2025 – 7pm
Territorio Doméstico is a feminist collective made up of female domestic and care workers who live in the Community of Madrid. They form a cross-border space which responds to a number of urgent problems: defending labour rights for female domestic workers and demanding the regularisation of migrant workers, as well as the right to family reunification, social recognition and the reparation of care debt by institutions.
The collective will provide accompaniment in this encounter by putting forward a cross-sectional round-table discussion centred on professional illnesses suffered by specific collectives of women doing jobs that are predominantly physical, such as care and domestic work and farm work. The aim is to shine a light on the physical and psychological tolls these body-oriented jobs take on the people that do them, in addition to the scant social, legal and healthcare recognition they receive.
Professional illnesses for women are often not recognised as such and are diagnosed simply as common illnesses, and with everything that entails on a legal and administrative level. Furthermore, obtaining sick leave can often become a huge struggle, thereby breaching labour rights.
The Museo Situado assembly convenes to discuss this reality, granting it the space it deserves to collectively call for solutions which respect the rights of all female worker.