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The Reina Sofia presents a selection of important works from its Collection in order to bring the public into closer contact with the artistic languages that developed during the 1980s and 1990s. The exhibition, curated by the Museum’s Director Manuel Borja-Villel, Head of Collections Rosario Peiró and Art Historian Beatriz Herráez, was orgnaized by the Museum as part of the “Uses of Art” project by the European museums network L’Internationale.

For further information and multimedia, please check Minimal resistance. Between late modernism and globalisation: artistic practices during the 80s and 90s.

This exhibition reviews Chris Killip's work (Douglas, Man's Island, United Kingdom, 1946), fundamental figure of the documentary photography, where, since the 70’s initiates a new route: the portrait of the working classes in full process of disappearance of the great industry that had created and supported them from beginning of the 19th century. The exhibition includes 107 pictures that gather daily scenes of the life in the North of England between 1968 and 2004. For the artist it is not a question of showing the historical experience, but to reflect the real life.           

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The exhibition is an invitation to reconsider the notion of art from several perspectives. On September 28, 2013 there will be held a unique event where 16 artists, critical and theoretical will be assembled in a concentrated program of interviews. The audio-visual material ensued from this meeting is the principal element of the project.

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Gabriel Acevedo Velarde (Lima, Peru, 1976) will show objects and videos related to histories of paranormal phenomena that, supposedly, happens in official buildings of Peru.

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Maria Loboda (Cracow, Poland, 1979) will show a specific installation for the Reina Sofia, concerning her interest for the "landscape" as a place where the limits among nature language, history and present, become more diffuse.

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The project that Alejandra Riera (Buenos Aires, 1965) will develop is based on her investigation about the unfinished project of experimental, choreographer, ballerina, poet and writer Maya Deren (1917-1961).

The works of Roman Ondák (Žilina, Slovakia, 1966) question the circumstances of the artwork in its relation to the conventions which determine the space and time of its presentation. Viewers are confronted with situations induced by the artist, often almost imperceptibly, which displace them from their own expectations. A discovery and knowledge of Ondák’s works gives rise to reflection and critical commentary upon what may or may not be identifiable as art, in an exercise of amplification of the recognizable world. In steering the viewer away from his or her own position, this work raises questions such as what is real about the artwork, which are the circumstances that affect recognition of the real, and what is the function of the viewer not only as interpreter but also as activator of the artistic process.
 

The 1960s may be the 20th century decade that wrote the code for our contemporary moment. Introducing text/information-based strategies, real-time, and the rupture of specific media boundaries into artistic practice, it defined creative criteria, models of authorship mediation, and new distribution networks that are still very much with us. The exhibition ± I96I posits a deliberately unfamiliar and anonymous temporal marker to spark debate about how and when the first new theoretical and artistic ground was broken, positing the point at which the “expanded arts” of the Sixties could first be glimpsed.

“Taking up the work of other people allows you a kind of contact even at a distance, a genealogy, a form of complicity and knowledge.” These are the terms in which Azucena Vieites (Hernani, 1967) speaks of a work that consists of approaching contemporary visual culture by means of strategies like citation, appropriation, inverventions centered on the idea of the original and the copy, processes of resignification, and the feminist thought and gender politics associated with subcultures. Her oeuvre might be considered a kind of DIY remix that attempts to represent a memory in relation to a present time and to an experience of passage, a memory whose intensity will gradually fade.

The intervention by Mitsuo Miura (Iwate, Japan, 1946) at the Palacio de Cristal is based on a pictorial installation oriented ultimately toward architecture and landscaping. By means of essential forms distributed around the space, with somewhat faded colors representative of a certain diffuseness, the artist proposes the creation of constructive forms that are merely suggested, and which relate to essential schematizations of experiences and images stored in his memory. The viewer can be a symbolic participant by making use of his or her own imagination and memory, here applied to an ambience linked as closely to the natural and organic as it is to the urban and cultural.

The period from the 1960s to the 1980s, the years that the new rooms in the Collection explore, is when the political, social, cultural and technological changes that would give shape to the contemporary global situation took place: decolonization, the uprisings of '68, feminist movements, the economic crisis, the expansion of popular culture and the emergence of other peripheral modernisms. It was also the moment that the art system found its specific field to be overflowing, spilling directly into the arena of all these processes, at the risk of losing the specificity of its conventional media – painting and sculpture – and even of its aesthetic mission.