
Marcel Broodthaers, Untitled (Triptych). 1965–66. Collection Sylvio Perlstein, Antwerp Image courtesy Maria Gilissen Archives of Marcel Broodthaers. © The Estate of Marcel Broodthaers c/o SABAM Belgium – VEGAP 2016
Held on 05 oct 2016
Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924 - Cologne, 1976) is a key figure of contemporary art, and a reference point and driving force in many current discourses and practices. Following his initial work as a poet, journalist and photographer, in 1964 Broodthaers decided to become a visual artist, and from that moment on concerns with providing a response to the basic questions posed by visual arts can be discerned as he interrogated the idea of representation and the production of meaning through the use of existing knowledge systems. In this round-table discussion Christophe Cherix, Jean-François Chevrier, Dirk Snauwaert and Manuel Borja-Villel will debate the different readings around the founder of the fictional museum.
Regarded as one of the originators of institutional critique, Broodthaers’ work questions the art institution whilst acknowledging his and other artists’ dependence on the circular axiom that presents the art museum as the institution containing all art, and art as all that which is contained in this same museum. The fictional institution he founded in 1968, the Musée d’Art Moderne. Département des Aigles (Musem of Modern Art. Department of Eagles, 1968–1972), which closed upon gaining institutional recognition at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, is conceived as an antidote to this inescapable axiom.
Where does Marcel Broodthaers stand today? His sceptical view of the empirical pragmatism of Minimalism and the uncritical celebrations of the society of the spectacle that were characteristic of Pop distanced him from the art movements of his time. Thus, Broodthaers, just like another of his Décor pieces – his historicist scenography – appears tied to an anachronistic position, banished from his present yet still a present-day protagonist, whereby numerous artistic and institutional practices appear to be epigones of his work.
This round-table discussion brings together museum directors and curators with broad knowledge of and specialisation in the Belgian artist and his exhibition approach, in addition to art historians who have questioned the frameworks of modern art, placing particular emphasis on the hermeticism and pursuit of failure as the horizon belonging to the creator of Jardin d’Hiver (Winter Garden, 1974).
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Christophe Cherix has been chief curator of Drawings and Prints at MoMa since 2013. Between 2010 and 2013 he was chief curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at the same museum. He was also the curator of the Cabinet des Estampes en el Musées d’art et d’histoire in Geneva. Cherix is the co-curator of Marcel Broodthaers. A Retrospective, and his curatorial work includes In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 (MoMA, 2009) and Fluxus Preview: Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection Gift (with Jon Hendricks, MoMA, 2009).
Jean-François Chevrier is an art historian and has worked as a professor at the National School of Fine Arts in Paris since 1988. He has curated a wide array of exhibitions, including Art and Utopia. Restricted Action (MACBA, 2004), a re-reading of modern art through Mallarmé and Broodthaers. His recent works have focused on the relationship between literature and contemporary art, for instance the book L’hallucination artistique de William Blake à Sigmar Polke (L´Arachneen, Paris, 2012) and the exhibition Biographical Forms (Museo Reina Sofía, 2013).
Dirk Snauwaert has been the director of WIELS. Contemporary Art Centre, Brussels, since 2005. He has also been co-director of Kunstverein Munich, and the Institut d’art contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône Alpes. Furthermore, he wrote his doctoral dissertation on the analysis of the museum conceived by Broodthaers, an artist on which he continues to focus his work.
Manuel Borja-Villel is the director of Museo Reina Sofía and co-curator of the exhibition Marcel Broodthaers. A Retrospective. He was also previously the director of Fundació Antoni Tàpies and MACBA (both in Barcelona), institutions which have also explored the artistic practice of Marcel Broodthaers.

![Marcel Broodthaers. Chez votre fournisseur (Le Vinaigre des Aigles) [At your supplier (Vinegar of Eagles)], 1968 © The Estate of Marcel Broodthaers c/o SABAM Belgium – VEGAP 2016](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/large_landscape/public/Actividades/broodthaers_2.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.

Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.

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.
![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.





![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)