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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Patio
Museo Reina Sofía and Radio 3 join up to celebrate International Museum Day
This day will see the radio station Radio 3 broadcast its programmes via a set that will be put together specifically for the occasion in the Museo’s Nouvel Patio. Radio 3’s customary schedule will be joined by acoustic performances from artists such as Manel, Izal, Hinds, Kiko Veneno, Óscar Mulero, Amaral... Niño de Elche, beGun, Fuel Fandango, Anaut, Muchachito, Amatria, Carmen Boza, Jorge Drexler, Alex Cooper, Corizonas, Los Nastys, Jayme Marques, Paloma del Sol, Novedades Carminha, Coque Malla, Los Mambo Jambo, Neuman, Anni B. Sweet, Modelo de Respuesta Polar, Ariadna Castellanos con Ed is Dead, Menil, Miss Caffeina, Lichis, Maika Makovski, Verónica Ferreiro, El Twangero, Papaya, and other pop-music figures. The final hours of the day will be uplifted by DJs and dance music, and part of the programmes will be streamed and can be followed on the Radio 3 website.
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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Niño de Elche: Animal Número
He has been called iconoclastic, toxic, refined, subversive, masterly, irreverent, and even the Antichrist of flamenco. In 2015 his record Voces del extremo was named album of the year by music critics. A rare breed, a philosopher, poet, mystic and politician who elevates and reclaims. With in-depth knowledge of tradition and blessed with a voice like an instrument, Niño de Elche transcends academic structures to create and express himself with total and brilliant freedom.
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May 18, 2016 Sabatini Building, Floor 1. Room 102
Company Carmen Fumero: …Eran casi las dos (…It Was Nearly Two O’clock)
To mark International Museum Day, the Museo Reina Sofía welcomes a piece awarded first prize in the 2015 Madrid Choreography Competition: the dance piece entitled …Eran casi las dos (…It Was Nearly Two O’clock), created by Carmen Fumero and Miguel Ballabriga.
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May 18, 2016
Guided tours around the Collection and exhibitions
Guided tours with volunteers around Collection 1
Time: 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThis tour offers a brief introduction to the key points that articulate the Museo’s Collection 1, which begins at the end of the 19th century and focuses on the tensions that shape modernity and historical avant-garde movements through works by Picasso, Dalí and Miró.
Apropos of… Campo Cerrado
Time: 12 p.m. and 7 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThe exhibition Campo Cerrado. Spanish Art 1939–1953 explores the cultural and artistic landscape of the early years under the Franco regime. In the face of the traditional historiographical obscurantism which reinforced clichés like the scarcity and irrelevance of cultural activity in the 1940s, this exhibition touches on the relationship between art and power at that time and on the ways of adapting or resisting that were adopted by artists. The exhibition includes works by Max Aub, Robert Capa, Eduardo Chillida, Salvador Dalí, Josep Guinovart, Maruja Mallo, Manuel Millares, Julia Minguillón, Joan Miró, Edgar Neville, Antoni Tàpies, Josefa Tolrá, Remedios Varo and Ignacio Zuloaga, among others.
Apropos of… Wifredo Lam
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThe guided tour around the retrospective exhibition on Wifredo Lam presents a broad set of pictorial works, drawings, prints and ceramics by the Cuban artist, as well as numerous documents: letters, photographs, magazines and books that accompany and contextualise the show’s chronological narrative.
Apropos of… Rémy Zaugg
Time: 6:00 p.m.
Meeting point: Retiro Park, Palacio de Velázquez Entrance
Capacity: 20 peopleA guided tour around the first monographic exhibition on Rémy Zaugg in Spain. Zaugg was one of the most prolific and versatile Swiss artists in the second half of the 20th century, and his interests were not confined to painting, despite this being his foremost discipline. He also worked and explored urbanism, curated exhibitions and wrote as a way of exploring the key elements in the creative process.
Seen and Unseen
Time: 18:30 h
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Attendance: via prior registration at mediacion@museoreinasofia.esIn this visit, geared towards the general public, a visually impaired person and an educator specialised in accessibility put forward multisensorial strategies for approaching art. By virtue of this initiative, the Museo gives value to the ways that the visually impaired perceive and approach art, and it invites visitors to an innovative experience of sensorial alteration and “denormalization” when contemplating artworks.
Feminism
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Meeting point: the connection between the Sabatini and Nouvel Buildings, Floor 1
Capacity: 20 peopleThe Feminism tour covers the spaces inside the Museo’s Collection, those devoted to historical avant-garde movements that question the role and visibility of women throughout the history of art through an analysis of female figures as producers, recipients and subjects-objects of artistic production. This tour aims to evoke a new perspective for visitors that critically considers images of male domination and acknowledges women’s work in overcoming these roles and models.
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May 18, 2016
Tour around the Museo’s Central Archive
Meeting point: Nouvel Building, Library Access
Admission: via prior registration at archivo@museoreinasofia.es, indicating your name and surname(s), and ID number
Capacity: 15 people
Duration: 1:30 hThe documentary collection housed by the Museo’s Central Archive opens a gateway into history, or, more specifically, into the institution’s holdings. The visit enters into dialogue with the archive and its role(s), making special reference to the history of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Central Archive: its itinerary, the documentation it conserves and the services it offers interested citizens.
To illustrate this presentation, a selection of special-interest documents including artists’ correspondence, reports on artwork restoration, documents related to the institution’s activity, and projects to expand the Museo building will be displayed, in addition to other materials.
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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Building, Library and Documentation Center. Space D, Floor 0
Guided tour around the exhibition Colectivo Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.), 1979-1985
With the show’s curator, Francisco Godoy Vega
The exhibition Colectivo Acciones de Arte (C.A.D.A.), 1979-1985 brings together a broad selection of materials from the Archive and work of C.A.D.A., which have been recently acquired by the Museo through dialogue with the material’s custodians, Lotty Rosenfeld and Diamela Eltit, and via research by Red de Conceptualismos del Sur.
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May 18, 2016 Nouvel Building, Study Centre, Floor 5
BookJockey session with Fosi Vegue from Blank Paper Escuela
Science and Fiction: A Journey in Which the Photographic Document Transcends an Unknown Dimension
Blank Paper Escuela puts forward BookJockey, an experimental format with which to show and enjoy photobooks. It involves a DJ session with contemporary photographic books, displaying and mixing materials to create a narrative which prompts the audience to perceive them differently.
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May 18, 2016
Tours around the Conservation-Restoration Area
Meeting point: calle Santa Isabel, 52 (office entrance), ten minutes before the start of the tour
Admission: full capacity
Capacity: 10 people
Duration: 40 minutesThe Museo’s Conservation-Restoration team offers two tours around the studio where they perform their work, which corresponds to a rigorous working methodology in line with the regulatory and professional criteria applied to the international museum world. As a result, the public can gain a first-hand understanding of the restoration processes currently being carried out.
Restoration programme developed with the sponsorship of: Fundación Mapfre.
International Museum Day 2016
- Live Arts
- Guided Tour
Held on 18 May 2016
On 18 May the Museo Reina Sofía will host a special programme to celebrate International Museum Day, held worldwide since 1977. The idea is to share a day of celebrations with visitors, who will be able to gain a better understanding of the lesser-known spaces and sides of the institution and feel part of its programme, exhibitions and working process.
In 2016 the radio station Radio 3 will join in with the festivities, and from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. the Radio 3 schedule will be broadcast from the Nouvel Patio, where it will welcome a wide array of special guests from the music and art scenes. Dance, music and a number of guided tours around exhibitions, departments and areas in the Museo will form the day’s programme.
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Más actividades
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.