Multimedia

This exhibition charts the work of Angela Melitopoulos (Munich, 1961) from 1999 to the present day, pivoting around video as installation and as essay, starting from her most recent project Matri-Linear B, currently in progress.

Melitopoulos uses video as a tool for sensory intervention on and in the real, in projects which, setting out from specific case studies, address the historical and technological conditions of our cinematic experience of the world. Her videos and installations explore memory, perception and the forming of collective historical awareness, in addition to mapping and the use of places in time, moving deeper into specific issues such as resistance to the scattering of migrant communities’ memory, territorial struggles against extractivism and the present of animist thought in technological society. During the process of creation in these works, different collaborations surface, whether via encounters she maintains with the people involved in developing research or through her relationship, sustained over time, with certain intellectuals, artists or activists.

This video is the last stop in Notes for a Time Apart, a programme held in the Museo Reina Sofía from 30 June to 16 December 2023 with activities that looked to address other modes of conceiving time, beyond its normative and purely metric dimension. The programme was made up of a range of activities such as artistic and architectural installations, workshops, lectures, performances and encounters. The audiovisual piece here, which now works as a non-linear rapporteurship, gathers some of the gestures, sounds and encounters that took place, and aims to acknowledge and thank those who were willing to share time (and their time) during the programme.

With the phrase “Making as if Wondering: So What Is This?”, Eva Lootz (Vienna, 1940) alludes to a particular way of understanding the activity of art; namely, making, allowing a questioning of the world from scratch. Rooted in such an idea, this exhibition sets forth a panoramic journey through five decades of her career. Along with a selection of pieces Lootz recently donated to the Museo Reina Sofía, an ensemble of works is displayed for the first time, or reconstructed specifically for the occasion, with a strong focus on her drawings, which, straddling exploration and text, constitute a kind of parallel writing that has accompanied her research and work, at different points, as a bona fide diary.

In this video Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Museum, explains the works created by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, Maria Loboda, Alejandra Riera and Manuel Saiz specifically for the Fisuras program.

The project Paranormal Citizen, by Gabriel Acevedo Velarde, makes use of televised stories about paranormal experiences to analyse and create narratives about the intermediate space between institutions and individual subjectivity. Maria Loboda, in The Beasts, engages in a kind of contemporary archaeology that starts with the recontextualization of objects containing various strata of meaning, in such a way that what is shown - even though it is inscribed in a place of safety such as a museum - has a potentially threatening dimension. Poétique(s) de l’inachèvement [Poetics of incompleteness] initiated by Alejandra Riera is the title chosen by the artist for a project that lingers in certain experiences so dense that film cannot take them in, although it does accompany them. Finally, One True Art - 16 Responses to the Question What Art is, by Manuel Saiz, is a performative artistic experiment the aim of which is to formulate a definition of art or to reflect on the reasons that such a definition is impossible.

The artist Mitsuo Miura in Imagined memories, his intervention in Palacio de Cristal, he delves into two of the aesthetic themes that give expression to his artistic vocabulary: geometric shapes and pure colours. For this building, one of Museo Reina Sofía's two secondary sites in Parque del Retiro, his proposal begins on the pictorial level and extends to the spatial level, through circles of colours distributed on the floor and suspended from the ceiling.

Montse Aguer, one of the exhibition's curators, takes viewers on a tour of the Salvador Dalí show, putting forward a new vision of the artist as a thinker, writer and creator of a very particular vision of the world. The exhibition comprises approximately two hundred works and is organised into eleven sections that follow something of a chronological order. The works on display date from the early years of his career up through his religious and mystical phases, his period of experimentation with scenography and also the end of his career, which was closely linked to science and technology.

Produced on the occasion of the master lectures of 2011, this video offers a comprehensive theoretical introduction to modernism with the art historian TJ Clark. The author of Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica (2013) and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), among other seminal studies, TJ Clark discusses the ideas that shaped modernism (the process of secularization, the loss of the aura or the disenchantment with the world) and how these notions survive or have been transformed throughout history, placing special emphasis on the Museum's Collection.

The Museo Reina Sofía pays homage to the figure of Richard Hamilton by means of an eponymous exhibition, held between 27 June and 13 October 2014. The piece, produced by Javi Álvarez, explores the most unique aspects of Hamilton’s work, reinterpreting many of the artist’s techniques, such as appropriation and collage, to convey them in the sphere of contemporary video.

Brian Walker, co-curator of the exhibition and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about George Herriman's show.

The work of Herriman came into being alongside the progress of the comic as a new artistic language surfacing in the USA at the tail end of the nineteenth century. This new medium brought with it a series of visual discoveries based on the repetition of drawings and patterns which, at this early stage, denoted a major narrative accomplishment. His most popular creation, the comic strip Krazy Kat (1913–1944), lauded by The Comics Journal as the century’s finest comic creation.

The exhibition William Kentridge. Enough and more than enough focuses on his stage work, including theatre, opera and performance, and takes this perspective to approach his sculptural projects.

William Kentridge, artist, Soledad Liaño, curator and Manuel Borja-Villel, director of Museo Reina Sofía, talk about the exhibition.