The Museo Reina Sofía, within the framework of Documenta Madrid, organises a retrospective on Ute Aurand (Germany, 1957), one of the most widely admired experimental film-makers in recent memory. Aurand’s work, comprising some forty films, is striking for being conceived in first person, a form of poetry based on the formal characteristics of analogue film in 16mm. The director will attend the series to present her work and engage with the audience.
Documenta Madrid devotes this year’s edition to archive images, the rationale behind foregrounding Ute Aurand and her work in this series. Film, an invention of modernity, comes into being as a great archive of the world, with the pioneering film-makers in the late nineteenth century travelling to record, show and assemble distant places in which, with the arrival of the camera, trade and industry would soon disembark for the purposes of expansion. Ute Aurand belongs to a counter-current tradition, in which film, far from visually conquering the world, fuses and dilutes through daily experience. Her film-making is also an archive, yet not so much an encyclopaedic repertoire of places and subjects as an ensemble of daily lives, memories and moments that are transfigured in beautiful epiphanies by the camera and by a unique 16mm poetic she implements in exceptional fashion.
Aurand shoots all her films in 16mm using a Bolex, the camera par excellence for experimental film, breathing life into a body of work which gains depth in all material and procedural qualities of analogue cinema. Her work is an affirmation of an artisan aesthetic and practice, inseparable from a particular way of seeing, that confronts the logics of the digital image pervading our present. Aspects such as thirty-second sequences, the maximum duration of film, editing from the same camera and the scarcity of filmed material are entwined with chromatic pulsations and grainy textures to give form to a beautiful poetic of the fleetingness that responds at once to technique and the filmed theme.
Her filmic compositions are made up of shimmering portraits of friends and relatives and vivid landscapes which mean something to her, two genres Aurand has worked on across decades. Each one is afforded a monographic programme in this series. These portraits and landscapes are a way of conversing with the passing of time while also retaining the deeply intimate nature of existence: moments of life transmuted into films. The third programme spotlights Aurand’s first-person collective conversation with other women film-makers, for instance Margaret Tait, Marie Menken and Ewelina Rosinska. This session, curated by Aurand, also alludes to the decades-long roles of film curator and conservator she has undertaken at Arsenal, the Institute for Film and Video Art, a German film centre and a reference point internationally.
En el marco de
Documenta Madrid
Organised by
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Las actividades de este programa
Conversations
Past activity
Duración total: 76’
Margaret Tait. Portrait of Ga [Retrato de Ga]
Escocia, 1952, 16mm, color, VO en inglés sin subtítulos, 4’30’’Renate Sami. Wenn du eine Rose siehst [Cuando ves una rosa]
Alemania, 1995, DCP, sonido, 5’Utako Koguchi. Sleeping Flower [Flor durmiente]
Japón, 1991, 16mm, color, sonido, 1991, 7’Marie Menken. Notebook [Cuaderno de notas]
Estados Unidos, 1962-1963, 16mm, color, silente, 10’Maria Lang. Familiengruft - ein Liebesgedicht an meine Mutter [Cripta familiar-un retrato de amor a mi madre]
Alemania, 1981, archivo digital, VO en alemán con subtítulos en español, blanco y negro, 10’Ute Aurand y Ulrike Pfeiffer. Oh! Die vier Jahreszeiten [¡Oh! Las cuatro estaciones]
Alemania, 1986-1988, archivo digital, color, sonido, 20’Ewelina Rosinska. Erde im Mund [Tierra en la boca]
Polonia, 2020, DCP, color, sonido, 20’Aurand pertenece a una tradición lírica y vibrante del cine en primera persona, en la que sostiene un diálogo con autoras del pasado, como la norteamericana Marie Menken (1909-1970) o la escocesa Margaret Tait (1918-1999), pero también del presente, como la polaca Ewelina Rosinska (1987). Una conversación sin fronteras generacionales ni geográficas, a la que se suman la japonesa Utako Koguchi (1961), mentoras como Renate Sami (1935-2023) y coetáneas como Maria Lang (1945) o Ulrike Pfeiffer (1951), todas ellas valedoras del cine como una forma de poesía y en la concepción artesanal del 16mm.
Landscapes
Past activity
— With a presentation by and discussion with Ute Aurand in the first session, moderated by film curator and experimental film theorist, Pablo Marín
Screening in 16mm
Total duration: 70’Ute Aurand. To Brasil
Germany, 2023, 16mm, colour, black and white, sound, 18’Ute Aurand. Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995
Germany, 2020, 16mm, colour, silent, 4’30’’Ute Aurand. Four Diamonds
Germany, 2016, 16mm, colour, sound, 4’30’’Ute Aurand. Junge Kiefern (Young Pines)
Germany, 2011, 16mm, colour, black and white, sound, 43’Places Aurand has visited throughout her life: Brazil, Japan, Scotland, in which her fascination with local culture mixes with an impressionistic visual perception. Fading fragments of architecture, people and nature speak of the ephemeral quality of travel, yet with the film-maker, forever clutching her camera, moving, and with no tripod, they are also a prolongation of her body. An ode to travel-based knowledge and learning.
Portraits
Past activity
— With a presentation by and discussion with Ute Aurand in the first session
Total duration: 61’Ute Aurand. Maria und Die Welt (Maria and the World)
Germany, 1995, digital archive, colour, black and white, sound, 15’Ute Aurand. Kopfüber im Gëast (Hanging Upside Down in the Branches)
Germany, 2009, 16mm, colour, silent, 15’Ute Aurand. Zu Hause (At Home)
Germany, 1998, 16mm, black and white, sound, 2’30’’Ute Aurand. Paulina
Germany, 2011, 16mm, colour, black and white, silent, 5’Ute Aurand. Franz
Germany, 2011, 16mm, colour, black and white, silent, 5’Ute Aurand. Lisbeth
Germany, 2011, 16mm, colour, silent, 3’Ute Aurand. Lisa
Germany, 2017, 16mm, colour, black and white, sound, 5’Ute Aurand. Renate
Germany, 2021, 16mm, colour, black and white, sound, 6’Ute Aurand. Zuoz
Germany, 2009, 16mm, colour, sound, 1’30’’Ute Aurand. Sakura, Sakura
Germany, 2015, 16mm, colour, black and white, sound, 3’Aurand composes these film portraits, awash with tenderness and empathy, from long-standing lived experiences with those depicted, most of them from the film-maker’s artistic and affective community. A portrait gallery that is, therefore, a homage to Berlin’s alternative culture scene over recent decades as the figures fuse with their environment in a rhythmic, rapid montage that speaks of the inexorable passing of time.
More activities
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art
23 February – 14 December 2026 – Check programme
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art is a study group aligned towards thinking about how certain contemporary artistic and cultural practices resist the referentiality that dominates the logics of production and the consumption of present-day art. At the centre of this proposal are the concepts of difficulty and deviation, under which it brings together any procedure capable of preventing artistic forms from being absorbed by a meaning that appears previous to and independent from its expression. By ensuring the perceptibility of their languages, difficulty invites us to think of meaning as the effect of a signifying tension; that is, as a productive and creative activity which, from the materiality of art objects, frees aesthetic experience from the representational mandate and those who participate in it from the passiveness associated with tasks of mimesis and decoding.
The economy of the referential norm translates the social logic of capitalism, where insidious forms of capturing subjectivity and meaning operate. In the early 1980s, and adopting a Marxist framework, poet Ron Silliman highlighted how this logic entailed separating language from any mark, gesture, script, form or syntax that might link it to the conditions of its production, rendering it fetichised (as if without a subject) and alienating its users in a use for which they are not responsible. This double dispossession encodes the political strategy of referential objectivity: with no subject and no trace of its own consistency, language is merely an object, that reality in which it disappears.
The political uses of referentiality, more sophisticated today than ever before, sustain the neoliberal-extractivist phase of capitalism that crosses through present-day societies politically, economically and aesthetically. Against them, fugitive artistic practices emerge which, drawing from Black and Queer studies and other subaltern critical positions, reject the objective limits of what exists, invent forms to name what lies outside what has already been named, and return to subjects the capacity to participate in processes of emission and interpretation.
Read from the standpoint of artistic work, the objective capture of referentiality may be called transparency. Viewed from a social contract that reproduces inequality in fixed identity positions, transparent in this objectivity are, precisely, the discourses that maintain the status quo of domination. Opposite the inferno of these discourses, this group aims to collectively explore, through deviant or fugitive works, the paradise of language that Monique Wittig encountered in the estranged practices of literature. For the political potency of difficulty — that is, its contribution to the utopia of a free language among equals — depends on making visible, first, its own deviations; from there, the norm that those deviations transgress; and finally, the narrowness of a norm which in no way exhausts the possibilities ofsaying, signifying, referring and producing a world.
From this denouncement of referential alienation, fetishisation and capture, Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art turns its attention to the strategies of resistance deployed by contemporary artists and poets. Its interest is directed towards proposals as evidently difficult or evasive as those of Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Kathy Acker, María Salgado and Ricardo Carreira, and as seemingly simple as those of Fernanda Laguna, Felix Gonzalez Torres and Cecilia Vicuña, among other examples that can be added according to the desires and dynamics of the group.
The ten study group sessions, held between February and December, combine theoretical seminars, work with artworks from the Museo Reina Sofía’s Collections and exhibitions, reading workshops and public programs. All these formats serve as spaces of encounter to think commonly about certain problems of poetics — that is, certain political questions — of contemporary writing and art.
Difficulty. Forms and Political Effects of Deviation in Writing and Contemporary Art inaugurates the research line Goodbye, Representation, through which the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship seeks to explore the emergence of contemporary artistic and cultural practices which move away from representation as a dominant aesthetic-political strategy and redirect their attention toward artistic languages that question the tendency to point, name and fix, advocating instead for fugitive aesthetics. Over its three-year duration, this research line materializes in study groups, seminars, screenings and other forms of public programming.
CLINIC 2628. A Community of Writing and Research in the Arts
February – October 2026
Clinic 2628 is a project which supports and brings together writings which stem from the intention to offer a space and sustainable time for research work in art and culture. Framed within an academic context which is increasingly less receptive to the forms in which thinking happens and is expressed, the aim is to rescue the academic from its neoliberal trappings and thus recover the alliance between precision and intuition, work and desire. A further goal is to return writing to a commons which makes this possible through the monitoring of processes and the collectivisation of ideas, stances, references and strategies.
The endeavour, rooted in a collaboration between the Museo Reina Sofía’s Studies Directorship and the Artea research group, via the i+D Experimenta project, is shaped by three annual editions conceived as spaces of experimentation, discussion and a demonstration of writings critical of what is put forward by today’s academia.
What forces, forms and processes are at play when writing about art and aesthetics? In academia, in museums and in other cultural institutions, the practice of writing is traversed by productivist logics which jeopardise rhythms of research and experimentation. The imposition of both scientism inherent in the structure of “the paper” and the quantifying of results which demand a criterion of quality and visibility sterilise and smoothen, from the outset, the coarseness that is particular to writing understood from the concrete part of language: phonic, graphic, syntactic and grammatical resistance connecting the language user to the community the language unites and activates. They also sterilise the roughness enmeshed in the same desire to write, the intuitive, clear and confusing pathways that once again connect the writer to those reading and writing, participating in a common good that is at once discovered and produced.
The progressive commercialisation of knowledge propelled by cognitive capitalism moves further away from the research and production of knowledge in artworks and artistic languages and practices. The work of curators and archive, criticism, performances and essays formerly saw a horizon of formal and emotional possibilities, of imagination that was much broader when not developed in circumstances of competition, indexing and impact. Today, would it be possible to regain, critically not nostalgically, these ways; namely, recovering by forms, and by written forms, the proximity between art thinking and its objects? How to write in another way, to another rhythm, with no more demands than those with which an artwork moves towards different ways of seeing, reading and being in the world?
27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference
Wednesday, 4, and Thursday, 5 March 2026
The 27th Contemporary Art Conservation Conference, organised by the Museo Reina Sofía’s Department of Conservation and Restoration, with the sponsorship of the MAPFRE Foundation, is held on 4 and 5 March 2026. This international encounter sets out to share and debate experience and research, open new channels of study and reflect on conservation and the professional practice of restorers.
This edition will be held with in-person and online attendance formats, occurring simultaneously, via twenty-minute interventions followed by a five-minute Q&A.
Submitting Proposals
The deadline for presenting proposals ends on 28 September 2025. Those interested must send an email to jornada.conservacion@museoreinasofia.es, submitting the following documents:
- An unpublished proposal related to the conservation or restoration of contemporary art.
- A 1,700-word summary, written in Word, on the theme addressed. Please indicate the topic at the top of the document with five keywords and the presentation format (in-person or virtual). Preference will be given to the in-person format.
- CV and contact details.
- Only one proposal per person will be accepted.
- Proposals related to talks given in the last three conferences will not be accepted.
Proposals may be submitted in Spanish, French or English and will be evaluated by a Scientific Committee, which will select the submissions to be presented during these conference days and will determine their possible participation in a subsequent publication, the inclusion of which will undergo a second and definitive evaluation by the Editorial Committee.
For submissions in a virtual format, participants must send a recording following certain technical requirements they will receive once participation is confirmed.
The programme of sessions will be published in the coming days.
Cultural Work
Thursday, 12 February 2026 – 5:30pm
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
Session number two looks to approach film as a place from which cultural work is made visible and processes of production engage in dialogue with artistic creation. From this premise, the session focuses on exploring how audiovisual content is produced, assembled and distributed, from the hands that handle the images to the bodies that participate in its circulation. The aim is to reflect on the invisible effort, precarity and forms of collaboration that uphold cultural life, that transform the filmic experience into an act that recognises and cares for common work.
The (legal) person and the legal form. Chapter II
8, 12, 15 January, 2026 – 16:00 to 19:00
As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.
This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.
The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.
In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?