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April 29, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
From Myth to Rumour. Ideas, Debates and Discourses
Serge Guilbaut. Presentation
Francis Frascina. Understanding Power: Cold War Myth and New York Museums
Serge Guilbaut. “Leur faire Avaler leur Chewing-Gum”: Some Tough Problems from the Political-Art Scene in France in 1954
Richard Leeman. “Nach 45”. Michel Tapié, Michel Ragon and Pierre Restany
Karen Kurczynski. The “International Spirit” of CoBrA -
April 30, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
Between East and South. Peripheries As New Settings
Serge Guilbaut. Presentation
Alessando del Puppo. From Neo-realism to Neo-avant-garde Art, Critique and Ideology in Post-war Italian Art, 1945–56
María Dolores Jiménez Blanco. A Closed Field? Reflections on Art and Autarchy in 1940s Spain
Gabriela Switek. “Envisaging Exhibitions”. Behind the Iron Curtain. The Central Office of Art Exhibitions in Warsaw (1949–1955)
Concluding round-table discussion with all participants
Radiations. European Art and its Debates during the Cold War, 1944–1955
Held on 29, 30 Apr 2015
The word “radiations” knowingly announces the interesting but also somewhat dangerous theme presented in this seminar: the reverberation of art discourses throughout Europe in a period of divide during the Cold War.
These sessions examine the tense period that elapsed between 1944 and 1955, a period in which the main artistic nuclei, Paris and New York, attempted to define their own powerful “universal image” to impress upon the world. The “New School of Paris”, on one side, and the “New School of New York”, on the other, competed in confrontation, while the rest of the world looked and learned. When at the end of the 1940s the Cold War created new types of world relations based on the division between antagonistic blocs, liberal America and the communist USSR, European countries were forced into reconsidering their values and discourses, their political and cultural identity. It was at this point that the debate became particularly complex and the point in which different concepts of artistic production materialised since the rhetoric of the Cold War tended to present opposing fields, each one using an array of mediums – art, film or music, for instance – to attack the other.
Therefore, offering a heterogeneous narration of how culture was produced in this period in different places and under similar global tensions is key, exploring the ideological alliances and friction between countries and art movements, whilst also acknowledging that art movements and debates changed depending on where they took place. As a result, Radiations. European Art and its Debates during the Cold War, 1944–1955 describes the complexity of the art world in Europe and also acknowledges new voices and positions that remained invisible for many years due to their variance with traditional canons designed in Paris and New York.
Participants
Francis Frascina. Emeritus Professor at Keele University. Noteworthy recent publications include Primitivism, Cubism and Abstraction: The Early Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 1993); Art Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America (Manchester University Press, 1999), Modernism in Dispute. Art Since the Forties (Yale University Press, 1993) and Un choix de Meyer Schapiro: My Lai, le Moma et la gauche dans le monde de l'art, New York, 1969-1970 (Editions Formes, 2014).
Serge Guilbaut. Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia. His noteworthy publications include How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Tirant Lo Blanch, 2007), Sobre la desaparición de ciertas obras de arte (On the Disappearance of Certain Works of Art, Curare/Fonca, 1995), and Los espejismos de la imagen en los lindes del siglo XXI (Mirages of the Image on the Outskirts of the 21 st Century (Akal, 2009). He has also edited the book Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris and Montreal 1945–1964 (The MIT Press, 1992) and curated the exhibition Be-Bomb (MACBA, 2007), alongside Manuel Borja-Villel.
María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco. Professor of Art History at the Complutense University of Madrid. Her salient publications include Arte y Estado en la España del siglo XX (Art and State in 20 th Century Spain, Alianza, 1989) and Una historia del museo en 9 conceptos (A History of the Museum in 9 Concepts, Cátedra, 2014). She is currently curating an exhibition on autarchy and exile in post-war Spanish art in the Museo Reina Sofía.
Karen Kurczynski. Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Massachussetts Amherst. Her recent noteworthy publications include Primitivism, Humanism, and Ambivalence: CoBrA and Post-CoBrA (RES59/60, 2011), Michel Ragon et CoBrA: Un dialogue sur l’expression populaire (Institut National de l'Histoire de l'Art, 2013) and Asger Jorn, Popular Art, and the Kitsch-Avant-Garde (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). She is currently co-curating an exhibition on the CoBrA movement entitled Animal Culture (NSU Art Museum, 2015).
Richard Leeman. Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Bordeaux. He has recently published Cy Twombly. A Monograph (Thames & Hudson/New York, 2005) and has worked as the editor on various publications such as Pierre Restany's Half Century (Editions des Cendres/INHA, 2009) and Michel Ragon, critique d'art et d'architecture (Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2013) .
Alessandro del Puppo. Professor at the University of Udine. He has recently published Modernitá e nazione. Temi di ideología visiva nella pittura del primo Novecentro (Quodlibet, 2013) and L’arte contemporánea. Il secondo Novecento (Einaudi, 2013).
Gabriela Switek. Professor at the University of Warsaw. Her recent publications include Art Playing with Architecture: Modern Affinities and Contemporary Integrations (Universidad Nicolás Copérnico de Torun, 2013), Aporias of Architecture (Zacheta-Narodowa Galeria Sztuki, 2012) and Writing on Fragments: Philosophy, Architecture, and the Horizons of Modernity (Warszawa, 2009). She is also editor of the publication Avant-garde in the Bloc (JRP Ringier, 2009). In 2006 she was curator of the Polish pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Más actividades
Files of Tropical Revolutions
Sábado 20 y 27 de junio, 2026 - 19:00 H
The Reframing Banana Imagery series concludes with two works that condense the height and twilight of this period in history, epic sagas that cross borders and registers to embody experiences of armed struggle in the region. Cameras mix with firearms, borders between nations blur and patience reaches breaking point. This is where the tipping point lies, where the bloodshed weighs heavy and the murmurings of regional brotherhood are buried in the ground again.
Pan y dignidad (Carta abierta de Nicaragua) [Bread and Dignity (An Open Letter to Nicaragua)] recounts the historical records and process of national reconstruction in Nicaragua via the Sandinista popular uprising. Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb) places the camera at the heart of the El Salvador revolutionary struggle, interspersing testimonies of daily violence with the verses of the poet Roque Dalton.
Both works understand the armed revolution as an open file under construction. The insurgent brotherhood, although dissolved, still resounds in regional history.
Circling Over Exploited Bodies
Friday, 19 and 26 June 2026 - 7pm
When forms of violence are inflicted on society, film responds from urgency. Images become abstract, sounds fade and the register of dissidence comes from the gut. La zona intertidal (The Intertidal Zone) is an essayistic and poetic approach to the repression of teachers in El Salvador in the 1970s — a teacher studies the biodiversity of the El Salvador coast as a boy finds a body on the same beach. A propósito de la mujer (About Women) interweaves testimonies of misery and rage towards patriarchal structures with fictional scenes of a symbolic procession through a harsh desert.
Both films understand the body as a target of violence and a territory of insurrection, a space where the blood shed by militancy and the patriarchal yoke turn pain into denouncement and existence outside the status quo into an act of political dissidence.
Central American Designation of Origin
Thursday, 18 and 25 June 2026 - 7pm
Fertile lands, farmers’ hands, rural faces. This first programme in the series Reframing Banana Imagery understands the foundations of the Central American experience from exploitation, extractivism and displacement, and from the organisation and resistance that emerged as a reaction. The four films within extend from a lyrical documentary on farmers’ solidarity to the playful subversion of the institutional format of the United Fruit Company.
Bananeras (Banana Growers) is a combative portrait of the inhumane conditions of the American banana plantations located in Nicaragua through much of the twentieth century. Costa Rica Banana Republic is a perspicacious satire via an institutional documentary of banana production, spotlighting the extractive nature of this agro-exporting model in the 1970s. Organización Campesina (Farmers’ Organisation) frames rural resistance in Honduras from a direct depiction and lyrical documentary, while Dos veces mujer (Two Times a Woman) dissects the invisibility of the double-shift working day Central American women farmers endure: working in the countryside and working in the home. As a whole, the works here present the earth at once as a wounded body and a space of dignity.
Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics
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.
equipoMotor
Jueves alternos, 23 de octubre, 2025 - 11 de junio, 2026 - 17:30 h
El programa equipoMotor regresa en su edición 25-26 con un aire espectral y mutante para lanzar la pregunta: ¿y si el Museo fuera «un poco más Frankenstein»? Inspirándose en dicho monstruo y en todas aquellas criaturas que desafían la norma desde los márgenes, el proyecto de mediación cultural Galaxxia diseña y acompaña una edición incisiva, intergeneracional y descentralizadora, donde saberes invisibilizados, cuerpos raros y deseos molestos se entrelazan para generar nuevas formas de imaginación crítica y radical. En los sótanos y corredores del Museo —un particular laboratorio— las dudas no se esconden: son materia prima.
Así, para este curso el equipoMotor convoca a personas de todas las edades que hayan participado en ediciones anteriores de los distintos equipos del Área de Educación a recorrer el Museo como quien manipula un cuerpo abierto: descoyuntando algunas de sus categorías teóricas y artísticas —la necropolítica, lo crip-cuir, la lucha de clases, las políticas del malestar, la decolonialidad, la temporalidad cuir, la descentralización institucional o el feísmo— para articular un relato díscolo, remendado y palpitante.
El programa se estructura en bloques temáticos sobre lo freak como metodología, el trabajo cultural, la intergeneracionalidad y la diversidad territorial. Cada bloque a su vez se despliega en sesiones que combinan disparadores teóricos y estéticos, visitas a exposiciones y espacios liminales del Museo, talleres artísticos con artistas, ejercicios de curaduría audiovisual colectiva y de relatoría radiofónica, así como instancias de activación pública, mediante proyecciones de cine experimental y coloquios compartidos con el público, en complicidad con el archivo Hamaca y el Área de Cine y Nuevos Medios del Museo.
De este modo, la presente edición incorpora una particularidad: el grupo de participantes irá transformándose en un «colectivo curatorial audiovisual temporalmente autónomo», con capacidad de incidir en la programación del Museo y de abrir la conversación de equipoMotor al público general, cuestionando y expandiendo así los límites entre las cabezas que deciden, las manos que producen y los cuerpos y presencias que habitan la institución. Las personas seleccionadas en la modalidad oyente serán invitadas a las proyecciones públicas, así como a otras activaciones y momentos de apertura del equipoMotor.
Frente al relato de un museo homogéneo, pulcro y lineal, apostamos por un Museo disidente, contradictorio y lleno de vida residual. Un Museo que no tema hacerse preguntas incómodas ni mostrar sus cicatrices. equipoMotor. Un poco más Frankenstein no busca repensar el cuerpo de la institución, sino habitarlo en sus desgarros, tal como es: híbrido, inacabado, infecto, fantasmagórico… y cargado de esporas y chispas por venir.