Multimedia

For most of its existence, the museum has done the exact opposite. Far from recognising the tension between the inscrutability of meaning and the opening to another language in the modern art work, the museum has watered it down to a contemplation that has become an auratic ritual frozen in a distant past. Dos lecturas sobre la colección (Two readings on the collection), along with La Colección Reescrita (Rewriting The Collection) represents an attempt to reintroduce the staging of diverse timeframes and heterogeneous periods involving the historical narrative and its own materiality within the museum. In so far as it is an institution that orders objects, artefacts, documents and the relationships between these things and the public in a series of narrations, the museum must consider not only which stories it is to tell, but also what devices to employ for their narration.

Itinerary of the exhibition Martín Ramírez: Reframing Confinement, held in Museo Reina Sofía from March 31 to July 12, 2010. Through a selection of works by Mexican artist, the exhibition examines the limits of the art system and the presence of the other in the space of an art institution. Martín Ramírez (1895-1963) produced his work in a confinement of more than three decades in a mental hospital, making his own painting materials and exploring a unique iconography that refers to the estrangement between two worlds, the origin of rural and indigenous Mexico and destination, a United States in the midst of a full-blown industrial development. The question posed by the exhibition is the lack of a non-reductionist vocabulary for understanding artistic categories beyond those undertaken by history of art.

Tacita Dean: The Friar's Doodle (Museo Reina Sofia, Monastery of Silos March 23-June 27) is a site-specific exhibition reviewing the history of the Monastery of Santo Domingo de Silos beyond its monumentality, classifying the traces of everyday life in the scribbles and graffiti of the columns of the cloister. In this inventory, the British artist shows a varied set of uses of space, such as as a witness to the work of the stonemasons, the rudimentary medieval games or the use the monastery as a shelter, building a fragmented and collective cultural history and relating film and photography with the evocations of minor narratives.

The Season of Celebrarions/ La saison des fêtes is a site-specific installation by Pierre Huyghe at the Palacio de Cristal del Retiro (March 17 to May 31, 2010) where, from a set of plant species in different seasons planted in a circle, the artist reviews the relationship between nature and tradition, myth, and celebration, recalling how events and the perception of time are determined by fiction and storytelling. In this video, Huyghe explains this site-specific project in relation to a series of constant lines of work which question time as phenomenology and reenactment as a mechanism for representation.

I March in the Name of Liberty but As Long As I Love you I am not Free and others struggle for liberation. 

During the Spanish Civil War hundreds of pieces of photojournalism were published on the conflict, in magazines in both Spain and abroad. The interest that the war aroused in other countries is manifested in the participation of foreign photographers such as Robert Capa or David Seymour ("Chim"). This room of the Collection also shows the work of photographers such as Agustí Centelles, Alfonso Sánchez Portela and Juan Pando.

This room of the Museo Reina Sofía Collection shows posters and drawings made during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), underlining the importance of the document in understanding the history of modern art. Works produced in series were, in 1930s Spain, one of the most effective weapons in communicating the effects of the war, and they influenced not just ordinary citizens but also artists such as Picasso and Miró.

In this work of the Museum's Collection, Juan Gris (1887-1927) plays with truth and illusion, using elements from daily life within the painting. The newspaper cuttings, for example, include messages about the socio-political context and double meanings, statements, opinions and specific allusions to the role of the artist, as interpreted by Eugenio Carmona and María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco.

The work of Juan Gris (1887-1927) has often been considered secondary and derivative; this video is a response to such affirmations. Through a visit to the room dedicated to him at Museo Reina Sofía, the work of this painter is re-evaluated, showing it to be the real source of the notions of analytic and synthetic cubism, based on a conception of painting as a poetic analogy of the world.

Modern architecture has a twofold condition; it is both construction and one of the mass media. The work of the artist Dorit Margreiter (Austria, 1967) analyses how architecture constitutes representation through a complex dissection of the specificity of the artistic medium. Along with the artist, Lynne Cooke, the subdirector of Museo Reina Sofía and curator, presents the ideas developed in the exhibition.