![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019. Museo Reina](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/large_landscape/public/Actividades/palestina_1.jpg.webp)
Held on 05 jun 2024
Palestine Is Everywhere is the international slogan of solidarity with the Palestinian people and also the title of a global debate that situates Palestine at the centre of our historical time, understanding the war in Gaza as the start of a new cycle shaped by colonial expansion. Under this title, the Museo organises an encounter that opens with a video recital by Palestinian poet Ibrahim Nasrallah, one of the best-known poetic voices in the Arab language. Following his intervention, artists and theorists Nitasha Dhillon and Amin Husain, part of the Decolonize This Place (DTP) movement, philosopher Marina Garcés and anthropologist Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona will exchange reflections, experiences and viewpoints on the Palestinian situation and cause in a round-table discussion. As a coda to the session, there will be a viewing of Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019), a work by Palestinian artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme which has recently been incorporated into the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a donation by Mercedes Vilardell in 2024. The eleven-minute video piece sets up a dialogue between the writings of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said (1935–2003) and AI-created images of protests at the wall that runs along the Gaza Strip.
With reverberations and protests around the world, Palestine has become a paradigm for a future to be recovered. Slogans such as Palestine Is Everywhere and Palestine Is All Around must be read in light of the rejection of the expansion of the colonial regime as they evoke the vindication and shared sense of inter-connected dissidences and movements for international freedom: from Palestine to the Brazilian rainforest, from Chiapas to Guinea-Bissau. With their resistance and demands, these territories are crying out for a new world-system that is more just, diverse and equal. What does it mean to be part of the planetary anti-colonial struggle? How to reorient ourselves towards fresh global movements that question the hegemony of the nation state? How to relate images of global freedom, those considered from desire, not pain, in this new temporal framework?
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and Cinema as Assembly
Inside the framework of
The Museum of the Commons project is organised by the L’Internationale museum confederation and co-funded by the EU’s Creative Europe programme. L’Internationale comprises fourteen major European art institutions: Museo Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), MACBA (Barcelona, Spain), M HKA (Antwerp, Belgium), MSN (Warsaw, Poland), SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, Netherlands), MSU (Zagreb, Croatia), HDK-Valand (Gothenburg, Sweden), NCAD (Dublin, Ireland), ZRC SAZU (Ljubljana, Slovenia), IRI (Italy), Tranzit.ro (Bucharest, Cluj and Iași, Romania) and VCRC (Kiev, Ukraine), as well as two associate organisations: IMMA (Dublin, Ireland) and WIELS (Brussels, Belgium).
Participants
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme are Palestinian-born artists who live between Ramallah and New York. Through sound, image, text, installation and performance they examine themes such as the intersections between political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. They have shown their work at institutions that include the MIT List Visual Arts Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2024), MoMA (New York, 2022), the Centraal Museum Utrecht (2021) and the Art Institute of Chicago (2021) and have participated in collective shows such as the Sharjah (2023) and Berlin (2022) biennales and at Appel Amsterdam (2018) and CCA Wattis in San Francisco (2018). Their work At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other (2019) is now part of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection via a donation made by Mercedes Villaroel in 2024.
Nitasha Dhillon is an artist, teacher and researcher specialised in journalism. With Amin Husain, she is part of the MTL Collective, which joins research, artistic practice and activism. She also contributes to the magazines Occupy Theory and Occupy Strategy and is part of movements and initiatives such as the Direct Action Front for Palestine and, more recently, the Strike MoMA Working Group and Decolonize This Place, which explore aspects such as Indigenous struggles, action against the patriarchy and freedom for Palestine. She is also a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Marina Garcés is a philosopher, writer and teacher. She is an undergraduate and MA professor in Arts and Humanities Studies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and has aligned much of her career towards practical, critical and collective thought that she propels from Espai en Blanc. Her publications most notably include En las prisiones de lo posible (Bellaterra, 2002), Un mundo común (Bellaterra, 2013), Filosofía inacabada (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2015), Nova il·lustració radical (Anagrama, 2017), Ciutat Princesa (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2018) and Escola d’aprenents (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2020).
Amin Husain is an artist, teacher and researcher who specialises in philosophy and political science. Of Palestinian-US origin, he is part of the MTL Collective with Nitasha Dhillon, an initiative that joins research, artistic practice and activism. He also contributes to the magazines Occupy Theory and Occupy Strategy and is part of movements and initiatives such as the Direct Action Front for Palestine and, more recently, the Strike MoMA Working Group and Decolonize This Place, which explore aspects such as Indigenous struggles, action against the patriarchy and freedom for Palestine. He is also a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Massimiliano (Mao) Mollona is a theorist and anthropologist. With interdisciplinary training in economy and anthropology, his work is centred on the relationships between art and political economy. He has conducted far-reaching fieldwork in Italy, the UK, Norway and Brazil, primarily in economic institutions, analysing the relationships between economic development and political identity through participatory and experimental film projects. His practice is situated at the crossroads between pedagogy, art and activism, and he is a co-founder of the Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and a member of the Cinema as Assembly group.
Ibrahim Nasrallah is a poet, novelist, teacher and journalist. He was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan and was educated in one of the UN Agency’s schools for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Following a long career as a teacher and journalist in Saudi Arabia, he returned to Jordan in 1996 and since then has devoted his work to literature. His prolific output, spanning poetry, prose and essay, is shaped by exile and the Palestinian conflict. Some of his most recent works include Gaza Weddings (Hoopoe, 2017), Prairies of Fever (Interlink Books, 1998) and Time of White Horses (Hoopoe, 2016). He has been honoured with the Award for Best Poetry Collection Published in Jordan and the Arab Literary Award.
Más actividades
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
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.