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International Museum Day, 2015
Saturday, May 16
Museum in Dance. Tour for children and adults based around artworks and movement
Location: Education Information Point, Floor 1, Sabatini Building. Registration up to half an hour before the start of the activity.
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Aimed at: familiesContemporary dance has a distinguished presence over this weekend. The proposal comprises a tour through painting and abstract sculpture, where the composition and meaning of the works chosen are presented to visitors by using corporeal expression and movement. The tour, open to both children and adults, who are invited to actively participate, strives to open new channels for perceiving, understanding and enjoying contemporary art.
Educational program developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Banco Santander
Dance. Trinity Test 1.0. Contemporary dance performance by Begoña Quiñones & Mar Rodríguez
Location: Patio Nouvel
Time: 12:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.
Length: 12 minutos
Admission: free
In collaboration with: Certamen Coreográfico de Madrid
Choreography and performance: Verónica Garzón, Begoña Quiñones and Mar Rodríguez
Music: Fabrizio di Salvo
Costume design: Mar Rodríguez and Begoña Quiñones
This choreography stems from a previous project called Load Fulcrum, set in motion by these two choreographers and dancers in the programme “Companies in Residence”, from the Canal Dance Centre, and gestating through the art residence granted within the framework of XVIII MASDANZA, by Dantzagunea and its Sortutakoak programme.Follow Me. Activity for young people <18
Activity design: Equipo
Equipo, the group of young people collaborating with the education department, invite participants to journey through the Museo using certain clues and indications to find out how much we follow our own footsteps or whether we are lead by others’ decisions.
Aimed at: young people aged between 13 and 18
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Capacity: 25 participants
Registration type: free activity, with prior registration at hastadieciocho@museoreinasofia.es or by phone on +34 91 774 10 00 ext. 2096
The activity revolves around the interest members of Equipo have taken in the world of social media and the trends it sets, conditioning young people’s tastes and choices. Are we actually as free as we think we are? Are we able to decide or do we do what we are told without thinking about it just to be part of the group? Would you blindly follow the orders of someone you don't know in a museum? Would you dare to discover new spaces by following clues without knowing who they’re from? This activity offers the chance to discover the Museo Reina Sofía from another point of view and to get to know the young people in the Equipo project.Educational program developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Banco Santander
Guided tours of the Collection and Exhibitions
Admission: Free, until full capacity is reached
Registration: Meeting Point, up to an hour before the start of each tour.
Capacity: 25 people per tour
11:30 a.m. La Colección reescrita
12:30 p.m. A propósito de... Aún no. Sobre la reinvención del documental y la crítica de la modernidad
12:30 p.m. A propósito de... Carl Andre. Escultura como lugar
5:00 p.m. Guernica. Historia de un icono
7:00 p.m. CuerpoEducational program developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Banco Santander
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International Museum Day, 2015
Sunday, May 17
Guided tours of the Collection and Exhibitions
11:30 a.m. Guernica. Historia de un icono
12:30 p.m. A propósito de… Fuego blanco. La colección moderna del Kunstmuseum Basel
12:30 p.m. A propósito de... Carl Andre. Escultura como lugar
5:00 p.m. FeminismoMuseum in Dance. Tour for children and adults based around artworks and movement
Location: Education Information Point, Floor 1, Sabatini Building. Registration up to half an hour before the start of the activity.
Time: 1:00 p.m.
Aimed at: families
Performers: Patricia Ruz, Tania Arias, Raúl Márquez and Pablo Martín Jones
Capacity: 30 people (children and adults)
Contemporary dance has a distinguished presence over this weekend. The proposal comprises a tour through painting and abstract sculpture, where the composition and meaning of the works chosen are presented to visitors by using corporeal expression and movement. The tour, open to both children and adults, who are invited to actively participate, strives to open new channels for perceiving, understanding and enjoying contemporary art.Educational program developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Banco Santander
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Día Internacional de los Museos, 2015
Monday, May 18
Presentation of the restoration of the work Portrait of Joella by Salvador Dalí and Man Ray
In 1933 Man Ray created the plaster portrait of Joella Bayer, the wife of New York gallery owner Julien Levy. On the occasion of an exhibition held the following year in the Julien Levy Gallery, Salvador Dalí intervened pictorially in the portrait plaster, transforming it into a sculpture-object.
To mark International Museum Day, the Conservation-Restoration Department will present to visitors the recent restoration of the work, carried out through the sponsorship of the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and its Art Conservation Program.Location: Room 205, Sabatini Building, Floor 2
Time: 11:00 a.m., 12:30 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.
Admission: Free, until full capacity is reachedRestoration programme carried out with the sponsorship of: FUNDACIÓN MAPFRE
Restoration of the work Joella with the sponsorship of: Bank of America Merrill LynchI call them simply books. Opening of the exhibition curated by Guy Schraenen
The exhibition I call them simply books, devoted to the «book as book», can be seen as part two of the previous one It is not new, it is a book, that it was a purely conceptual approach to the book. The title is a quotation by Peter Downsbrough, an American artist who has published numerous «books» since 1972.
Artists’ books are a new and revolutionary way of dealing with the space of the book, it is not considered any more as a mere container of information, but as a creative space. These books are generally of average format, of traditional appearance and the materials and printing techniques are unexceptional; but while the conventional books and their content can be diffused by other media, the artists' books of this exhibition can only exist as books. They are, even published in several hundreds of copies, original art works. The various drawings, photographs, etc., used to be reproduced in these works should not be considered as originals, but the books themselves, the book as a work of art. Thus we call them "books" in the same way we call a painting "painting".
Among the artist presented are works by Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, James Lee Byars, José Luis Castillejo, Mirtha Dermisache, Peter Downsbrough, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Michael Snow and Bernard Villers.
Location: Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Center. Space D, Floor 0
Time: 7:00 p.m.Radio Nacional de España visits the Museo Reina Sofía
Location: Nouvel Building. Floor 1
Time: 8:00 to 12:00 p.m.
Admission: Free, until full capacity is reached
Access time: access until 11 p.m.
From inside the Museo, Radio Nacional de España will broadcast the evening news, 24 horas (24 hours), directed by Miguel Ángel Domínguez. Visitors will have the chance to attend its broadcast live.Special late opening, until 11 p.m., to the exhibition White Fire. The Kunstmuseum Basel Modern Collection
The Museum offers the chance of visiting the extraordinary exhibition la extraordinaria exposición White Fire. The Kunstmuseum Basel Modern Collection until 11 p.m. coinciding with the International Museum Day.. The Kunstmuseum Basel is considered one of the finest public municipal museums in the world. The two cornerstones of its collection are the works dating from the 15th and 16th centuries, on one side, and artworks from the 19th century to the 21st, on the other, with the ensemble of the latter making it one of the most significant collections of contemporary art in Europe.Guided tour of the Library
The Documentation Centre and Library offer the chance to discover their facilities in this visit. The aim is to divulge their collections and services as a study and research tool for contemporary art. A selection of highly valued pieces will be on display, ranging from Vicente Huidobro’s poem Tour Eiffel, published in 1918 and with an illustrated cover by Robert Delaunay, to the SMS collection of multiples edited in New York in 1968 by The Letter Edged in Black.Location: Nouvel Building, Documentation and Library Centre. Space D, Floor 0
Time: 9:30 a.m. and 10:45 p.m.
Capacity: 20 people per group
Registration: prior registration at antonio.majado@museoreinasofia.es
Registration deadline: May 17Guided Tours
Visita comentada al Archivo en que se encuentra la memoria histórica del Museo
The Central Archive offers the chance to discover its history and documentary content by way of an explanatory talk on the role of archive within the institution. It aims to divulge its collections and services as a source for the study and research of contemporary art.
Location: Nouvel Building, Study Centre. Space D, Floor 5
Time: 11:00 a.m.
Capacity: 20 people
Registration: prior registration by writing to archivo@museoreinasofia.es
Registration deadline: May 18
Apropos of… White Fire. The Kunstmuseum Basel Modern Collection
This guided tour aims to demonstrate that a collection is more than just a list of masterpieces added systematically. The objective is to delve deeper and expand, by looking at the history of what is widely considered the number-one public municipal museum in the world, the aspects that have forged one of the most important and representative collections of modern and contemporary art in Europe over the years.
Registration: Meeting Point, up to one hour before the start of each visit
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Capacity: 25 people per visit
Leap into Space. Visit-workshop led by circus artists
Leap into Space is a family activity that puts forward an innovative way of moving closer to contemporary art through resources taken from circus arts and conducted by circus artists. These artists will foster the ongoing interaction between children and adults and the works of Lucio Fontana, Gil J. Wolman, Wolf Vostell and Yves Klein, leading them towards a new stage of art appreciation.
Location: Education Information Point, Floor 1, Sabatini Building. Registrations up to half an hour before the start of each activity.
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Aimed at: families
Performers: Jorge Jorge y Dalí Bergamaschi
Capacity: 30 people (children and adults)
Seen and Unseen. A Tour through visual and tactile impressionsThis tour is designed as an alternative experience, one where a visually impaired person and an educator specialised in accessibility provide multi-sensory strategies to approach art by means of a descriptive visit around Collection 2 with visual and tactile impressions. The commentary on the works selected includes impressions obtained by the visually impaired person through tactile exploration, for instance with sculptures, and the thorough visual analysis of various paintings and photographs by the sighted person. The aim of the initiative is to encourage visitors to experience and share the process through which visually impaired people access art content.
Time: 12:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m.
Educators: Azucena Hernández and Asier Vázquez
Registration: Meeting Point, up to one hour before the start of each visit
Capacity: 20 people per visit
Further information: email accesibilidad@museoreinasofia.es or by phone: +34 91 774 10 00, Ext. 2033Educational program developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Banco Santander
Held on 16, 17, 18 May 2015
The Museo will once again be taking part in the celebration of International Museum Day (IMD), held on 18 May, contributing, on 16, 17 and 18 May, with dance activities, workshops and a programme of guided tours that aim to offer plural viewpoints of its Collection and temporary exhibitions. These will include the remarkable Kunstmuseum Basel collection, a descriptive visit through visual and tactile impressions and special or hidden places inside the Museo, which this year will pass through the library facilities and the archive spaces that conserve the Museo’s historical memory, offering an overview of the restoration processes recently carried out on Portrait of Joella by Salvador Dalí and Man Ray.
International Museum Day (IMD) has been held worldwide since 1977, providing the chance to meet with visitors and involve them in museums’ role as spaces for critical awareness, the dissemination of art and culture and the exchange of ideas and knowledge. Spaces which, on a daily basis, face challenges of sustainability, the connection to multiple communities surrounding them and the creation of sustainable networks that share and circulate narratives. The theme adopted by ICOM this year is Museums for a sustainable society, which fully encompasses museums’ permanent priorities and lines of work.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
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.