Activities

The Museo Reina Sofía develops a diverse programme inside the framework of ARCOmadrid 2024. Under the title The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean, this edition calls attention to the Caribbean region’s make-up of hybridisations, mixes and creolisations, a mental and geographical space traversed by the poetics of relation, in reference to the concept of Martinique thinker Édouard Glissant.

This encounter, in conjunction with the exhibition What They Saw. Historical Photobooks by Women, 1843–1999, curated by Russet Lederman and Olga Yatskevich, seeks to reflect on the female gaze and the photobook, an artistic medium which has come to the fore in recent years, despite historiography and exhibitions continuing to favour male authorship. The activity comprises a conversation between the publisher Sonia Berger and the aforementioned editor Russet Lederman, followed by an intervention from the photographers Liza Ambrossio, Manuela Lorente and Lúa Ribeira.

Organised jointly by the Museo Reina Sofía and the Southern Conceptualisms Network, Archives of the Commons is a bi-annual encounter which arises from the need to urgently initiate a dialogue between spaces where memories gestate and are cared for. The aim is to open up opportunities for exchange and reflection around archive practices understood as exercises of political, artistic and social commitment, as well as sounding out experiences that evoke future memories and pasts to come, exercises of imagination and critique which are key to articulating and constructing narratives of memory in resistance.

This conference examines the historical relationship between colonialism, authoritarianism and fossil fuels from the spheres of ecological and energy humanities.

Since December 2022, via the programme Perturbable School II, seminars on political violence and institutions, the work of Margarita Azurdia, and other situated voices, this Temporary Intensity Zone raises questions around the illness and healing of the institutions that shape us and the bodies with which we traverse and make them.

Twenty years on from the sinking of the Prestige, this Temporary Intensity Zone calls upon the collective potential of a self-organised citizenry facing the life-threatening side of environmental disaster.

Archipelago once again makes its yearly return, inviting audiences to explore the complexity of the contemporary world through listening. In this particular edition, it looks to delve into the discourse of modernity in experimental music, its unrecognised roots and the history, politics and ideologies that govern our tastes.

The Museo Reina Sofía premieres an internally produced online documentary on the artist Elena Asins, resulting from research into the artist’s archive conducted over a two-year period, and assembling unpublished documents and unprecedented interpretations around one of the key figures in geometric abstraction and art as research since 1960.

Amid the deeply unusual context brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Museo Reina Sofía joins the LGTBIQ+ Pride celebration by examining the legacies of sexual and gender dissidence.

In conjunction with the Transgender Day of Remembrance, held annually to remember those who have been killed through transphobia, hate and fear, the Museo Reina Sofía will organise an encounter to present the Archivo de la Memoria Trans (Archive of Trans Memory, AMT).

Uncertain Times III. Sustaining Lives, the third instalment comprising the summer cinema, is devoted to possible futures in this new period. Held for the first time in the Sabatini Garden and split into two themed weekly sessions, it orbits around the world we are gingerly returning to and the challenges and questions it raises.

The third edition of the seminar Archives of the Commons, co-organised by the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) and the Museo Reina Sofía, takes as its point of departure a question that seeks to operate as a concept: Is it possible to put in place an archive as non-appropriable?

This programme sees the Museo Reina Sofía bring together an ensemble of initiatives that will be held over the coming months (from lectures and workshops, exhibitions and digital projects, to guided tours and presentations of the Collection), encompassing the wide-ranging forms of feminist revolt present in our day-to-day.

This latest instalment of the Intervals programme, which screens recent film work, welcomes the first feature-length film by artist and film-maker Filipa César (Porto, Portugal, 1975). Spell Reel (2017) constitutes a reflection on the political history of West Africa, made from precarious film archives of the colonial emancipation of Guinea-Bissau, giving rise to an open question raised on how to write the history of those who have been driven out of the present and the role bygone remnants can play in shaking up our contemporaneity.  

This eighth edition of Situated Voices, promoted by the Museo Situado network, an initiative in which different migrant collectives and neighbourhood associations from Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood collaborate with the Museo Reina Sofía, reflects on the borders which obstruct crossings and refuge for people in the contemporary world.

The 1936 coup d’état and the ensuing civil war splintered reality, the pieces scattering across complex [in]exiles, disappearances, silences… faltering and inconclusive narratives, fertile, multifocal and widespread memories that pulse and throb today, cross-examining the present and managing to distort a univocal, hegemonic gaze.

Taking this question as his point of departure, Takao Kawaguchi (1962) began, in 2013, to explore the possibilities of copying the movements of the acclaimed choreographer Kazuo Ohno (1906–2010) as a way to access the intrinsic and seemingly non-transferable qualities of this figure, central not only in Japanese post-war dance but also the universal history of the discipline in the twentieth century.

Within the framework of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, the Museo Reina Sofía presents We Forge The Future, a performance by the industrial rock band Laibach, who formed in 1980 and is one of three landmark groups making up the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst). The performance will be preceded by a guided tour of the exhibition led by Laibach member Ivan Novak.   

The joint presentation of the Cubism Collections of the Telefónica Foundation and Museo Reina Sofía affords an opportunity to reconsider conventional narratives of the Cubist experience. This day-long seminar responds to this need, setting out to address diverse conceptions in the Cubist experience and aiming to encapsulate Cubism’s capacity for dissemination and refraction.

En estas conferencias se analizarán y ampliarán las ideas claves de la exposición Piedad y terror en Picasso. El camino a Guernica. En concreto, se atenderá a cómo la guerra –a través de sus imágenes, su tecnología y la progresiva aniquilación de una serie de valores hasta entonces estables-, dejó su impronta en la obra de Picasso, conduciendo a la transformación de la misma idea de arte moderno. El ciclo contará con intervenciones de TJ Clark, Anne Wagner, Rosario Peiró, Charlie Miller, Nancy Berthier y Eugenio Carmona.

Premiere of the recent documentary about Hélio Oiticica. Put together as a living archive of numerous unpublished documents, from the artist’s thoughts as a narrative guide to unexplored audiovisual fragments, the film looks to articulate a complex and multiple narrative of the artist and the post-war Avant-garde movement in Brazil.

Museo Reina Sofía presents 20 Dancers for the XX Century by the French choreographer and incumbent director of the Musée de la danse, Boris Charmatz. The piece will feature the participation of twenty dancers and performers and will be executed across different gallery spaces housing the Museo’s Collection.

Archipiélago es un ciclo de conciertos y un proyecto de investigación que se desarrolla entre 2017 y 2023 con el objetivo de cuestionar la universalidad del término “experimentación" en el ámbito de la música occidental. Surgido como concepto en Estados Unidos, este término se ha replicado hasta generar un canon e incluso un género. A lo largo de sus diferentes ediciones, este ciclo reúne a diferentes músicos, performers e investigadores de diversas partes del mundo en un intento de repensar otras formas de experimentación alejadas de los marcos de pensamiento hegemónicos. En colaboración con agrupaciones musicales y artistas procedentes de distintas áreas geográficas, Archipiélago aborda este concepto de “experimentación” desde variadas perspectivas.

Inspired by the tragic event that took place 75 years ago, Guernica is much more than a work of art. It has become a universal statement on the massacre. This condition, a synthesis of avant-garde pursuits and political engagement, has had a great influence not only on the visual arts but also on literature. The poetry reading, given in front of the painting by the writer Bernardo Atxaga (Guipúzcoa, 1951), includes poems by Luis Cernuda and Paul Éluard and traces the impact that the mural by Pablo Picasso has had on the written word.

On 18 May the Museo Reina Sofía will host a special programme to celebrate International Museum Day, held worldwide since 1977. The idea is to share a day of celebrations with visitors, who will be able to gain a better understanding of the lesser-known spaces and sides of the institution and feel part of its programme, exhibitions and working process.

The so-called “refugee crisis” has pervaded Western screens, showing death in the Mediterranean and the exodus through Europe as a major humanitarian catastrophe. This series looks at how artists and film-makers in Europe and the Middle East have reacted to the situation, reflecting on the implications of its visibility and the strategies for responding to what is shown.

The concept of extended art as designed and practiced by Joseph Beuys (Krefeld, 1921 - Düsseldorf, 1986) requires communication routes that go beyond traditional exhibition forms, in addition to photography and text. Actions are a central medium in his work, as are his appearances in public during conferences and debates and the long-term processes that he initiated with projects like 7,000 Oaks. The structural elements in these works can be captured by film and video. By recording the images and sounds of these events and actions, which date back many years in Beuys’ oeuvre, they can be more intensely reproduced, while the visual documents offer reliable material for analysis at the same time. This series of screenings presents an approach to the themes in Joseph Beuys’ work with the assistance of extracts and examples from the artist’s audiovisual legacy that include hundreds of scenes in order to illustrate his human side and illuminate the incredibly complex structure of his artistic work from another angle. The videos and films that recorded his actions, like Eurasia Siberian Symphony, Celtic and Filz TV, contain numerous references to earlier situations and contexts for using the materials and objects that form part of installations today as reminiscences of his actions or are found in collections as isolated pieces. In this way, it is possible to experience the genesis of specific works and the nature of the process of the overall work. The visual documents complete the installations and the exhibited objects.

This series is dedicated to the work of artist, photographer and director Ulrike Ottinger (Konstanz, 1942), one of the most emblematic figures of the New German Cinema, paradoxically overlooked by official histories. Ottinger began working in film in the 1960s (during which time she studied photography, history and ethnology at the side of teachers including John Friedlaender, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu), although she did not make her first film as a director until 1972, when she directed Laocoon & Sons with Tabea Blumenschein (Konstanz, 1952). The film premiered at the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin in 1973. With Madame X - Eine absolute Herrscherin (1977), a film about a female pirate, Ottinger revealed her interest in questions of gender, although in the 1980s she distanced herself from traditional feminist paradigms to interrogate the existence of a ‘female’ aesthetic, an alternative way of seeing the world, and begin to explore new discourses about identity. Her Berlin Trilogy marked a critical moment in this turn, since in it she tackled questions like androgyny and dandyism using a somewhat queer sensibility. From this point of view, Ottinger’s work has the special distinction of re-appropriating the aesthetics of narcissism from a feminist discourse, proposing a renegotiation of subjectivity and going beyond the more traditional debates in feminist theory on gender and sexuality.

India is a place of abundant contrasts: part of the population lives in full post-modernity, modernity can still be found in another, while another segment - perhaps the majority of the population - lives anchored in feudalism. From a western standpoint, Indian film is a complex thing that breaks with the aesthetic codes and parameters established in the West in its themes and forms. Understanding it means delving into the culture and idiosyncrasy of its peoples.

The international conference Politics, State Power and the Making of Art History in Europe after 1945 explores the ways political power seeks to shape and influence the activities of art historians, art critics, museum professionals and cultural institutions in order to control the understanding of art and artistic heritage from 1945 to the present.

In this seminar, Fundación de los Comunes, Red de Conceptualismos del Sur and Museo Reina Sofía put forward a reflection on issues of social, cultural and political memory through the work of archives that guard, transmit and produce public memory generated by the current forms of social action conservation, which also shuts out major parts of collective experience from dominant discourse.

This presentation introduces the publication Losing the human form. A seismic image of the 1980s in Latin America, conceived in connection to and in dialogue with the exhibition of the same name. The publication, unlike a conventional catalogue, does not enumerate the works and practices found in the exhibition but rather presents itself as yet another (possible) mechanism by which to activate these practices in a reflection about the present.

Active in the UK between 1982 and 1997, the Black Audio Film Collective symbolised a radical attempt to transform education, institutions and the representation of black identity in independent film, with their work condensing a complex palimpsest of voices that, found between nascent politics of representation, put forward a language of diaspora.

With his films, Harun Farocki (Czech Republic, 1944) dissects the control, representation and value systems derived from capital and its images. This event, the first of the Intervalos program, shows two recent works, one of which was produced by Museo Reina Sofía, and also includes a lecture by Thomas Elsaesser. 

This conference is organised by the art research group Otros Criterios, which is linked to the History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture master's program and to the complementary action program of the Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The event is an attempt to examine the artistic phenomenon using the subject of creation - the artist - as its point of departure. 

In relation to the exhibition Not Yet. On the Reinvention of Documentary and the Critique of Modernism, this series of lectures offers a context for the discussion on the reframing of documentary culture in the 1970s and 1980s. The programme brings together international scholars to debate some of the key aspects of the exhibition from different perspectives.

Fluxus to the People is a program of concerts, activities, guided tours, lectures and also a documentary exhibition, all of which explore the imagination of the collective, the idea of art as a community tool and the process of de-specialization of the artist figure that is at the heart of the Fluxus movement. This program has consciously been given the format of a festival. First of all, it defends the playful, participatory and even burlesque nature of many of the avant-garde manifestations from 1960 onwards. Secondly, it explores new ways of approaching contemporary art from public activity.