September 22 — December 21, 2010 /

Sabatini Building, Floor 1, Sabatini Garden and Nouvel Building, Floor 0, Hallway

Under the premise that the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is an exhibition, collection and communication space, during autumn of 2010 a project is developed and produced involving four artists who intervene in the relationship between the Museum and the public. To do this, their creations occupy a series of spaces that do not normally exhibit work.

Atelier Bonanova presents Hora solar. Una esgarrifança per la tardor, (Solar Time. A Shiver for Autumn), a sound installation located in the gardens of Sabatini Building with which the artist vindicates the sundial as a way of measuring time, an alternative to the usual horological practice. Atelier Bonanova, consisting of José Luis Mata and Antonia Payero, questions the uses and abuses that come from the critics, the market and the politics of art, and they question the structures of political and economic power.

Pedro Bericat (Zaragoza, 1955) opts for an installation in one of the public elevators in the Nouvel Building, where he mixes the circumstantial with social criticism and even humour. Bericat, interested in intercommunication and the global lack of communication, has worked since the Eighties in the field of installation, mail art and sound art.

Through the projection Tardecer by Trinidad Irisarri (Madrid, 1959) the spectator contemplates, from the lobby of the Nouvel Building on the first floor, in real-time, the retransmission of a sunset from the highest point of the Museum. Likewise the information screens, located at different parts of the building, repeat the transmission of the piece Midiendo el otoño, where the artist performs an exhaustive daily measurement of all the leaves and branches that fall during autumn, both in the Museum gardens as well as in the Parque del Retiro in Madrid. The total weight is 366,439 kg, a quantity that could produce energy amounting to 104 kw/h, enough to supply electricity to the Reina Sofía Museum for 45 minutes.

In Arte, cultura e impostura (also in the museum), Domingo Mestre (Valencia, 1960) moderates a panel discussion on action, participation and representation in Spain and Argentina, with activist groups related to public art. Mestre is a visual artist, researcher and cultural activist who since the early nineties has promoted and participated in programmes related to action art, activism and new technologies, cultural policies and citizen participation.