Held on 06 oct 2017
In conjunction with Palimpsest, the installation Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958) will display in the Palacio de Cristal from 6 October, the Museo Reina Sofía will hold an encounter between the artist and the historian Estrella de Diego, where both will examine how art confronts the way in which violence perforates each gesture, object and situation in contemporary society.
Salcedo studied at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá between 1988 and 1991, complementing her knowledge of sculpture at New York University in 1994, where she studied the minimalist movement, a language she would radically subvert. Her work tackles the relationship art bears with trauma and its capacity to publicly reveal and exorcise grief in the face of loss, thus adopting the repetition and seriality of minimalist sculpture to define a silent space and poignancy that is conducive to memory and remembrance. Yet, contrasting with practices in minimalism, the artist references specific violent episodes in recent Colombian history in such a way that her installations sit halfway between relic – personal objects, furniture, hair, clothes — and anti-monument, granting visibility to victims deprived of public recognition.
Salcedo’s body of work is indivisible from the context of Colombia and the so-called “culture of the wound”; that is, the link between violence, privacy and public space. Exposing and probing this wound through art, yet standing back from the sensationalism and frivolity found in certain corners of the mass media, constitutes one of her primary aims. Therefore, works such as Atrabiliarios (1990–1991), a series of twenty niches with footprints left by the shoes of Colombian women who have been victims of kidnapping and rape but remain unidentified, or La Casa Viuda (1992-1995), an installation made up of sculptures of assembled furniture and doors taken from houses destroyed by the so-called “death squads” in Colombia, show the viewer the history and invisible subjects of a society in conflict.
In collaboration with
Participants
Doris Salcedo. Artist. She has participated in a wide array of international events, including the São Paulo Biennial (1998), documenta XI, Kassel (2002) and the Istanbul Biennial (2003), and has been the subject of solo exhibitions in institutions such the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1998); the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999 and 2005); Tate Britain, London (1999); Camden Arts Centre, London (2001); Tate Modern, London (2007); Inhotim, Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Belo Horizonte (2008); the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; Moderna Museet, Malmö; CAM Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2011); MAXXI (Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Rome; the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2012); the Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima (2014); and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2015). Salcedo also won the Premio Velázquez in 2010 and the Nasher Prize in 2015.
Estrella de Diego. Essayist and professor of Contemporary Art at the Complutense University of Madrid. She has developed her research into gender studies and contemporary artistic practice in numerous publications, such as La mujer y la pintura del siglo XIX español (1987); El andrógino sexuado (1992); Tristísimo Warhol (1999); Quedarse sin lo exótico (1999); Querida Gala. Las vidas ocultas de Gala Dalí (2003); Remedios Varo (2007); Maruja Mallo (2008); No soy yo: autobiografía, performance y los nuevos espectadores (2011) and Rincones de postales: turismo y hospitalidad (2014). In 2010, she won the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts, and joined the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2016.
![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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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
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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.
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
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“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
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Miriam Martín and Ana Useros