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
![Tracey Rose, The Black Sun Black Star and Moon [La luna estrella negro y negro sol], 2014.](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Obra/AD07091_2.jpg.webp)
On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.