Program
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7:00 p.m.
Lecture by Jean-François Chevrier
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8:00 p.m.
Colloquium with Ahlam Shibli and Claire Tenu, moderated by Jean-François Chevrier
Conversation on Biographical Forms
Jean-François Chevrier, Ahlam Shibli and Claire Tenu
Claire Tenu. Exhibition view. Saint-Ouen, 2011
Date and time
Held on 27 nov 2013
The exhibition Biographical forms. Construction and individual mythology reviews the narrative dimension of art in its relationship with literary manifestations. The selection of works analyses the binomial “life and work” as well as the identity and biography construction mechanisms that operate throughout 20th century artistic activity. The biographical story is thus interpreted as a construct of an individual mythology in which the artist takes part, by means of a process of searching for and constructing the subject. Traditionally set in opposition to the visual arts, the literary realm, which also includes anti-literary manifestations and ones outside the institutionalised field of literature, reveals itself to be a broad area of knowledge that encompasses psychoanalysis, anthropology and critical theory and is vital for proposing a new writing about art.
This event serves as an introduction to the exhibition with a lecture by its curator, Jean-François Chevrier, followed by a colloquium with two of the artists represented, Ahlam Shibli and Claire Tenu. The colloquium is intended to encourage debate on the confluences and distances between the two artists’ ways of approaching the biographical. On the one hand, Ahlam Shibli, a Palestinian artist who works in the documentary dimension of photography, in broad series structured around the analysis of the processes of construction and representation of identity in relation to a territory battered by conflict and displacement. On the other hand, Claire Tenu, a photographer whose work derives from her inquiry into the photographic medium as a poetic narrative and investigation into place and its memory.
Participants
Jean-François Chevrier. Art historian and critic, professor at the National School of Fine Arts of Paris. Among other exhibitions, he has curated Another Objectivity (Centre National des Arts Plastiques, Paris, and Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato, 1989), Photo-Kunst (Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, 1989) and Art and Utopia: Restricted Action (MACBA, 2004). He recently published L’Hallucination artistique. De William Blake à Sigmar Polke (Éditions L’Arachnéen, 2012). He is the curator of the exhibition Biographical forms. Construction and individual mythology (Museo Reina Sofía, 2013).
Ahlam Shibli. Artist. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Basel, the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and the Darat al Funun/Khalid Shoman Foundation in Amman, among others, and she has participated in collective shows such as the 27th Biennial of Sao Paulo (2007), Documenta 12 (2007) and The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia (MACBA, 2008). In 2013 she created the exhibition Phantom Home, which was hosted by MACBA, Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Serralves, Oporto.
Claire Tenu. Artist. Fellow of the Terra Foundation residency in Giverny in 2012, she has conceived the solo exhibition and the book La ville que nous voyons at the art center Le Point du Jour in Cherbourg, France in 2013. She is now working with the artists group RADO on a public commission (CNAP) initiated by the association Peuple et Culture Corrèze in Tulle, France.
![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
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
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.
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
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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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