David Breslin, David Kiehl and Marion Scemama
Held on 06 jul 2019
In conjunction with the solo exhibition David Wojnarowicz. History Keeps Me Awake at Night (running until 30 September 2019), an exhibition staged by the Museo Reina Sofía on artist David Wojnarowicz (New Jersey, USA, 1954 – New York, USA, 1992), Marion Scemama’s film Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: a Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life, 1989–1991 will be shown for the first time in Spain. A conversation between the film-maker, who will introduce the film, and David Kiehl and David Breslin, the show’s curators, will take place after the screening in the first session.
Wojnarowicz atypically represents, through art, the fight against the stigma attached to AIDS and the gay community in 1980s New York. Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds splices the artist’s observations and opinions in different everyday moments in his life and, through an interview conducted by French theorist Sylvère Lotringer, assembles fragments of the visual work and personal archives of the director of A Fire in My Belly, displayed for the first time in this film. Scemama’s work thus creates an intimate, sensitive and political audiovisual portrait, depicting the artist with the AIDS virus and clinging to life as he challenges the demonization of the gay community in New York in what were the early manifestations championing politics of non-discrimination and care for those affected by HIV. Framed in this context, the film is a powerful and elegiac portrayal of artistic activity on New York’s Lower East Side, of which Scemama was a part, and some of its pre-eminent figures. In the conversation that follows, the curators will set out to analyse the major influence the American artist had on art-making focused on identity, biography, body and difference.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
In collaboration with
illycaffèDavid Breslin is a curator and director of Collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has curated exhibitions such as Spilling Over. Painting Color in the 1960s and Where We Are: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1960, and co-curated An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017, with David Kiehl, Jennie Goldstein and Margaret Kross. He is, along with David Kiehl, curator of the retrospective David Wojnarowicz. History Keeps Me Awake at Night.
David Kiehl is curator emeritus at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has curated a broad array of exhibitions on artists that include Yayoi Kusama, Pat Steir, Christina Marclay, Jenny Holzer, Pat Steir, Kiki Smith, Richard Tuttle and Ellen Gallagher, and co-curated An Incomplete History of Protest: Selections from the Whitney’s Collection, 1940-2017, with David Breslin, Jennie Goldstein and Margaret Kross. He is, along with David Breslin, curator of the retrospective David Wojnarowicz. History Keeps Me Awake at Night.
Marion Scemama is a Moroccan-born photographer and artist based in Paris. After living in Uruguay and France she arrived in New York 1981 to work as a photographer for a French magazine. Two years later she would cement a long-lasting relationship with David Wojnarowicz, and both worked on producing audiovisual and photographic projects until the artist’s death in 1992. In that period, Scemama’s most notable work includes Pier 34 (Relax Be Cruel) (1983), Last Night I Took a Man in the Subway and When I Put My Hands on Your Body (both in 1989).
Wednesday May 29, 2019 – 7:00 pm
Self-Portrait in 23 Rounds: a Chapter in David Wojnarowicz’s Life, 1989–1991
France, 2018, colour, original version with Spanish subtitles, digital archive, 78’
Saturday 6 July, 2019 – 7:00 pm
Tuesday, 16 December 2025 – 7pm
As a preamble to the opening of the exhibition HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, film-maker Oliver Laxe (Paris, 1982) engages in conversation with the show’s curators, Julia Morandeira and Chema González, touching on the working processes and visual references that articulate this site-specific project for the Museo Reina Sofía. The installation unveils a new programme in Space 1, devoted from this point on to projects by artists and film-makers who conduct investigations into the moving image, sound and other mediums in their exhibition forms.
Oliver Laxe’s film-making is situated in a resilient, cross-border territory, where the material and the political live side by side. In HU/هُوَ. Dance as if no one were watching you, this drift is sculpted into a search for the transcendency that arises between dancing bodies, sacred architectures and landscapes subjected to elemental and cosmological forces. As a result, this conversation seeks to explore the relationship the piece bears to the imagery of ancient monotheisms, the resonance of Persian Sufi literature and the role of abstraction as a resistance to literal meaning, as well as looking to analyse the possibilities of the image and the role of music — made here in collaboration with musician David Letellier, who also works under the pseudonym Kangding Ray — in this project.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.
13 DIC 2025
The Shape of Now is a documentary that explores the challenges and paradoxes of memory, reparation and post-conflict justice, extending a defiant and questioning gaze towards the six-decade armed conflict in which the Colombian State, guerrillas and paramilitary groups clashed to leave millions of victims in the country. The screening is conducted by the Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics study group and includes a presentation by and discussion with the film’s director, Manuel Correa.
The film surveys the consequences of the peace agreements signed in 2016 between the Colombian State and the FARC guerrilla organisation through the optics of different victims. It was recorded shortly after this signing, a time in which doubts lingered over the country’s future, with many groups speculating in the narration. Correa harnesses the power of images, visual and bodily memory, fiction and re-staging as tools for understanding the conflict, memory and healing, as well as for the achievement of a just peace that acknowledges and remembers all victims.
The activity is framed inside the research propelled by Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics, a study group developed by the Museo’s Study Directorship and Study Centre. This annual group seeks to rethink, from a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic perspective, the complex framework of concepts and exercises which operate under the notion of pacifism. A term that calls on not only myriad practices ranging from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to activism for non-violence, but also opens topical debates around violence, justice, reparation and desertion.
Framed in this context, the screening seeks to reflect on propositions of transitional and anti-punitive justice, and on an overlapping with artistic and audiovisual practices, particularly in conflicts that have engendered serious human rights violations. In such conflicts, the role played by audiovisual productions encompasses numerous challenges and ethical, aesthetic and political debates, among them those related to the limits of representation, the issue of revictimisation and the risks involved in the artistic commitment to justice. These themes will be addressed in a discussion held after the session.
Thursday, 11 December - 8pm
The third session in the series brings together two international reference points in sound art in one evening — two independent performances which converse through their proximity here. Barbara Ellison opens proceedings with a piece centred on the perceptively ambiguous and the ghostly, where voices, sounds and materials become spectral manifestations.
This is followed by Francisco López, an internationally renowned Spanish sound artist, who presents one of his radical immersions in deep listening, with his work an invitation to submerge oneself in sound matter as a transformative experience.
This double session sets forth an encounter between two artists who, from different perspectives, share the same search: to open ears to territories where sound becomes a poetic force and space of resistance.
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
The third instalment of Cinema Commons, a research, programming and publishing project which explores how film articulates interpretive communities, fosters collective debate and devises proposals for common spaces, presents L’Abominable, an artist- and film-maker-run independent film-lab founded in 1996 on the outskirts of Paris. The programme is structured around three sessions: a lecture-workshop on L’Abominable, conducted by film-makers Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abominable; and the feature-length film Une île et une nuit (An Island and One Night), made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
Better known by the shortened version of L’Abo, the artist-run laboratory emerged in response to disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and endeavours to offer the creative community a self-managed space in which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super8, 16mm and 35mm. With this underpinning, L’Abo champions the aesthetic and political experimentation of analogue cinema opposite digital hegemony.
L'Abominable, more than a simple work tool, has become a space of artistic and social exchange which has knitted together a community. It is characterised by endowing technique with a poetic dimension, in a community that manufactures its own film devices, and situates pedagogy at its core — the film-makers and artists train one another on common ground. Further, it seeks to forge an opening to all experimental languages around celluloid, for instance installation and film performance, while constituting a place of preservation and conservation in the history of the medium.
L'Abominable is an example of how, at the height of the digital age, artists and film-makers are recovering cinematography and vindicating the production process in its entirety. This autonomy invents alternative routes in the industry as it creates new tools, develops other forms of expression and explores unknown cinematic territories.
Wednesday, 3 December 2025 – 7pm
Framed inside the Museo Reina Sofía’s retrospective exhibition devoted to Maruja Mallo, this lecture delivered by Estrella de Diego draws attention to the impact of the artist’s return to Spain after her three-decade exile in Latin America.
Committed to values of progress and renewal in the Second Republic, Mallo was forced into exile to Argentina with the outbreak of the Civil War and would not go back to Spain to settle definitively until 1965 — a return that was, ultimately, a second exile.
Mallo saw out her prolific artistic trajectory with two impactful series: Moradores del vacío (Dwellers of the Void, 1968–1980) and Viajeros del éter (Ether Travelers, 1982), entering her most esoteric period in which she drew inspiration from her “levitational experiences” of crossing the Andes and sailing the Pacific. Her travels, both real and imaginary, became encounters with superhuman dimensions.
In parallel, her public persona gained traction as she became a popular figure and a key representative of the Generation of ‘27 — the other members of which also started returning to Spain.
This lecture is part of the Art and Exile series, which seeks to explore in greater depth one of the defining aspects of Maruja Mallo’s life and work: her experience of exile. An experience which for Mallo was twofold: the time she spent in the Americas and her complex return to Spain.
![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)