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)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
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.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
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.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.