Reactivations of the Performance Work of James Lee Byars and Miguel Benlloch
Reescenificación de las performances de James Lee Byars en el Palacio de Velázquez, Madrid, 2024.
Fotografía: David Serrano
Held on 29 jun 2024
The performances of James Lee Byars (Detroit, Michigan, 1932 – Cairo, 1997) bring together the aesthetic and life concerns of this unique artist. In conjunction with the exhibition the Museo Reina Sofía devotes to the artist, under the title James Lee Byars. Perfect Is the Question, and inside the framework of the programme Living Matter. Other Approaches to Material, this day re-stages, over two sessions, a selection of James Lee Byars’s performances, which open a dialogue with his visual work inside the space of the show. In the form of a coda, the activity also includes the presentation of a new performance conceived specifically for the occasion, Acaeció en Granada, which explores Byars’s relationship with the artist Miguel Benlloch (Loja, Granada, 1954 – Seville, 2018) in the city of Granada.
For the first time in Spain, part of Byars’s performance work is brought to the stage: in the Palacio de Velázquez, ten performers of different ages, genders and in differing conditions will stage five pieces by employing replicas of the wardrobe the artist designed. For its part, Acaeció en Granada is based on a same-titled text by Benlloch, written in 2013, concerning his relationship with Byars through the construction, activation and destruction of La esfera de oro (The Golden Sphere, 1992), a work by the American artist developed inside the project Plus Ultra, which was produced by BNV Producciones and curated by Mar Villaespesa as part of the activities in the Andalusian Pavilion at the Universal Exhibition of Seville, more commonly known as Expo ’92. The action presented in this session features the participation of writer Aurora H. Camero, cultural manager Julio Jara Laura García-Lorca de los Ríos, the grandniece of Federico García Lorca, and the artist Julio Jara.
James Lee Byars peerlessly represented the nexus between art and mysticism in the twentieth century, the minimalist language of his work in the 1960s and 1970s transforming to give form to liturgical objects that explore ideas of the ephemeral, the perfect and the transcendental. In his work, conceived as a spiritual experience, traditions and knowledge from East and West, esoteric knowledge and procedural practices, and material refinement and mystical ascetism converge. Thus, his performances are a synthesis of rituality and happening, whereby the performers, as if priests, act in a great liturgy which aspires to affect time and space, with the performative pieces, therefore, occupying a foundational and genuine place in the origins of action art.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
The Estate of James Lee Byars; Michael Werner Gallery, Nueva York, Londres y Berlín; Pirelli HangarBicocca (Giovanna Amadasi y Marcella Vanzo), y Archivo Miguel Benlloch
The Performances of James Lee Byars
Concept: James Lee Byars
Stage director: Rafael Romero de Ávila
Assistant: Javier Ortiz
Performers: Rosa Arroyo, Carmen Mayordomo, Benito Olía, Natalia Ortega, Javier Ortiz, Antonia Paso, Pablo Paz, Melanie Pindado, Marcos Rodríguez, Álvaro Vicente, Germán Vigara
With the collaboration of: The Estate of James Lee Byars; Michael Werner Gallery, New York, London and Berlin, and Pirelli HangarBicocca (Giovanna Amadasi and Marcella Vanzo)Performance of Acaeció en Granada
Concept and stage director: Enrique Fuenteblanca, from the texts of Miguel Benlloch
Performers: Ana Rocío Dávila, Laura García-Lorca de los Ríos and Julio Jara
With the collaboration of: the Miguel Benlloch Archive
Second session: 8pm
James Lee Byars, Be Quiet, 1980-2024
James Lee Byars, Ten in a hat, 1968-2024
James Lee Byars, Four in a dress, 1967-2024
James Lee Byars, Five Points Make a Man, 1994-2024
James Lee Byars, Breathe (Two in a Hat), 1968-2024
Enrique Fuenteblanca, from the texts of Miguel Benlloch, Acaeció en Granada, 2024
8 October 2025 – 24 June 2026
The study group Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion: Prefiguring New Pacifisms and Forms of Transitional Justice proposes a rethinking—through both a theoretical-critical and historical-artistic lens—of the intricate network of concepts and practices operating under the notion of pacifism. A term not without contestation and critical tension, pacifism gathers under its name a multiplicity of practices—from anti-militarism and anti-war movements to non-violence activism—while simultaneously opening urgent debates around violence, justice, reparation, and desertion. Here, pacifism is not conceived as a moral doctrine, but as an active form of ethical and political resistance capable of generating aesthetic languages and new positions of social imagination.
Through collective study, the group seeks to update critical debates surrounding the use of violence and non-violence, as well as to explore the conflict of their representation at the core of visual cultures. In a present marked by rearmament, war, genocide, and the collapse of the social contract, this group aims to equip itself with tools to, on one hand, map genealogies and aesthetics of peace—within and beyond the Spanish context—and, on the other, analyze strategies of pacification that have served to neutralize the critical power of peace struggles. Transitional and anti-punitive justice proposals will also be addressed, alongside their intersections with artistic, visual, and cinematic practices. This includes examining historical examples of tribunals and paralegal activisms initiated by artists, and projects where gestures, imaginaries, and vocabularies tied to justice, reparation, memory, and mourning are developed.
It is also crucial to note that the study programme is grounded in ongoing reflection around tactics and concepts drawn, among others, from contemporary and radical Black thought—such as flight, exodus, abolitionism, desertion, and refusal. In other words, strategies and ideas that articulate ways of withdrawing from the mandates of institutions or violent paradigms that must be abandoned or dismantled. From feminist, internationalist, and decolonial perspectives, these concepts have nourished cultural coalitions and positions whose recovery today is urgent in order to prefigure a new pacifism: generative, transformative, and radical.
Aesthetics of Peace and Tactics of Desertion, developed and led by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Management, unfolds through biweekly sessions from October to June. These sessions alternate between theoretical discussions, screenings, work with artworks and archival materials from the Museo’s Collection, reading workshops, and public sessions. The group is structured around sustained methodologies of study, close reading, and collective discussion of thinkers such as Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Juan Albarrán, Rita Segato, Sven Lütticken, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Franco “Bifo” Berardi; historical episodes such as the anti-nuclear and anti-arms race movement in Spain; and the work of artists and activists including Rojava Film Commune, Manuel Correa and the Oficina de Investigación Documental (Office for Documentary Investigation), and Jonas Staal, among other initial cases that will expand as the group progresses.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
![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)