Bruce Conner. CROSSROADS, 35mm film, black and white, sound, 37 min. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Accessions Committee Fund purchase) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with the generous support of the New Art Trust
Held on 22 feb 2017
On the occasion of the retrospective dedicated to the artist Bruce Conner, Bruce Conner. It’s All True, at the Museo Reina Sofía (from February 22 to May 22, 2017), an encounter is presented between specialists Rudolf Frieling and Gary Garrels that seeks to analyze the influence of the creator in current artistic practices. Over the last decade, a number of artists have turned their attention to artistic figures from the last century who explored the production of hybrid forms, challenging artistic genres. In this sense, Bruce Conner (1933-2008) is one of the most representative cases.
The way Bruce Conner played with different roles and identities, his mix of styles spanning every technique, from painting to film and performance, via drawing, sculpture, photography and prints, gave rise to a long list of contradictory descriptions that saw critics interpret an eclectic practice, until the artist finally concluded “It’s all true”.
His commitment to materiality and language, both from collage and film, provides a historical example of art’s ongoing attempt to critically and playfully counteract the consumer culture of performance. Often wrongly called “the father of the music video”, Conner is, nevertheless, a prominent reference by dint of his meticulous yet also irreverent insight into mass culture. His films, often controversial from a political point of view, address themes such as violence in American culture, the objectification of the female body and nuclear apocalypse.
Moreover, today’s renewed interest in the most grotesque and fun strands in his work is connected to the impact of remixes and mashups from internet culture. Therefore, the encounter will survey works with either a complex exhibition history or with limited exposure; for instance, the assemblages and pieces the artist made at the end of his life, after officially retiring, in which he revisited, reformulated and refined old materials, such as his ‘90s punk collages or his ‘60s and ‘70s films, which he transferred to a digital format.
In collaboration with
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Participants
Rudolf Frieling has been curator of media arts at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art since 2006. Noteworthy exhibitions he has organised in the museum include In Collaboration: Early Works from the Media Arts Collection (2008), The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (2008/2009) and Stage Presence: Theatricality in Art and Media (2012). He also recently curated Film as Place (2016) and has produced over twenty shows with Sylvie Blocher, Jim Campbell, David Claerbout, Bill Fontana, Douglas Gordon, Lynn Hershman-Leeson, Sharon Lockhart, William Kentridge and Christian Marclay, among other artists. Frieling is also co-curator of the retrospective Bruce Conner: It’s All True at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (2016), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Reina Sofía (2016–2017).
Gary Garrels has been curator of Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art since 2008, organising exhibitions like Jasper Johns: Seeing with the Mind's Eye (2012–2013) and co-curating Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective (2011). Garrels was also chief curator and deputy director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, from 2005 to 2008, and chief curator of Drawings and curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from 2000 to 2005, in addition to other institutional roles. He is co-curator of the retrospective Bruce Conner: It’s All True at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2016), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museo Reina Sofía (2016–2017).
![Bruce Conner. SPIDER LADY HOUSE [Hogar de la señora araña], 1959. Madera, nailon, patín de hielo, partes de muñeca, cuerda, joyas, plumas, pelo de animal, corchos, papel pintado y papel sobre madera. Colección del Oakland Museum de California. Donación de la Collectors Gallery y del National Endowment for the Arts ©Bruce Conner, VEGAP, Madrid, 2016](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Exposiciones/0%26%23039%3B.jpg.webp)
![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)
Más actividades
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.
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.
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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.