Encounter with Concha Jerez
Encounter with Concha Jerez, 2021. In this picture (from left to right): Manolo Borja-Villel, Concha Jerez and Fernando Castro Flórez. Photograph: Celia Maldonado
Held on 24 feb 2021
On the ocassion of the Concha Jerez retrospective, Our Memory Is Being Stolen (29 July – 11 January 2021), the Museo Reina Sofía organises an encounter with the artist, alongside critic and theorist Mieke Bal and critic and exhibition curator Fernando Castro Flórez, two figures behind the exhibition catalogue and and the participation of Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía and Ängeles González-Sinde, president of the Board of Trustees of the Museo Reina Sofía.
Critiques of media censorship and reflections around the workings of repression have shaped the work of Concha Jerez for decades and across multiple artistic supports. The exhibition presented the artist’s work from the 1970s to the present day, retrieving and revising it from a perspective in which personal memory and collective memory interweave: a concern taken on by the artist over a large part of her career. The show unfolded around different spaces in the Museo and presented new site-specific productions for the stairways of the Sabatini Building, to which the artist refers as a “great container of memory”, a former hospital upon which forgotten, self-censored, written and oral memory is re-inscribed, and often silenced. The show also displayed a selection of works that span a broad temporal arc: from her “self-censored writings”, made in the 1970s, to the InterMedia installation Espectros de silencio (Spectres of Silence, 2001).
Mieke Bal is a professor of Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA). Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining literary theory, semiotics, feminism, art history, cultural studies and post-colonial theory. Notable among her publications is the book Tiempos trastornados: análisis, historias y políticas de la mirada (Akal, 2016). Bal is also a video artist and her work has been exhibited in numerous countries.
Manuel Borja-Villel is the director of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Fernando Castro Flórez is head professor of Aesthetics at the Autonomous University of Madrid and an art critic and exhibition curator. He regularly writes for ABC Cultural, Descubrir el arte and Revista de Occidente, and his numerous books include Mierda y catástrofe: síndromes culturales del arte contemporáneo (Fórcola, 2014), Estética de la crueldad: enmarcados artísticos en tiempo desquiciado (Fórcola, 2019) and Filosofía tuitera y estética columnista (Fundación NewCastle, 2019). He is also a member of Museo Reina Sofía’s Advisory Committee.
Concha Jerez is an artist who has been honoured with Spain’s National Award for Plastic Arts (2015) and the Velázquez Prize (2017) and, since the 1970s, has developed an intensive creative project, setting out from conceptual art to make site-specific interventions that are markedly critical. A performance pioneer in Spain, she has made numerous sound art and radiophonic pieces, most notably those created with sound artist and composer José Iges.
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![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)
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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.
Sven Lütticken
Friday, 10 October 2025 – 7pm
Academic disciplines are, effectively, disciplinary — they impose habits of thought, ideological parameters and, a priori, methodological parameters on those who have studied them. Yet what does being disciplined by art history mean? What has art history done to us? Further, what can we continue to do with it? The Juan Antonio Ramírez Chair, an annual programme organised by the Museo Reina Sofía which is devoted to reflecting on art history and historiography, and their limits and vanishing points, invites Sven Lütticken to explore these questions in light of different cases chosen by Lütticken and related to his own practice.
His work, framed inside art history and theory, has constantly championed expanding, interrogating and questioning the limits of discipline until it becomes theoretical and (self)critical. Throughout his trajectory, Lütticken has aligned his interest primarily towards historical, critical and theoretical research around autonomy. An important landmark in this working strand is his participation in the The Autonomy Project, an initiative from the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven with different art schools and university departments and resulting in the published volume Art and Autonomy (Afterall, 2022). A second strand is made up of the long-term project Forms of Abstraction, which analyses contemporary artistic practices as interventions in forms of “real abstraction”, such as value-form, precisely as Marx theorised it.
Sven Lütticken will be a resident on Studies Constellation, the Museo Reina Sofía’s annual fellowship programme, and will work on the research project Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction.