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?
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.
![Basel Abbas y Ruanne Abou-Rahme, At Those Terrifying Frontiers Where the Existence and Disappearance of People Fade Into Each Other [En esas fronteras aterradoras donde la existencia y la desaparición de personas se disuelven entre sí], 2019](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Colecci%C3%B3n/abbasabourahme.png.webp)
Gaza and Aestheticide
Tuesday February 10, 2026 – 16:00 h
This seminar examines the systematic destruction of Palestinian collective sensibility — what we might call “aestheticide” — that has accompanied Israel’s genocide and ecocide in Gaza, and considers the conditions of artistic practice in its aftermath. Over more than two years, the demolition of universities, archives, museums, and libraries has not only erased cultural and intellectual infrastructure but has also targeted the very possibility of representation itself. The destruction of a people has been accompanied by the destruction of their image, their history, and their capacity to be known: reportage, scholarship, and cultural memory have been deliberately undermined, with media institutions, universities, and museums often complicit in this repression. Gaza consequently functions as a rehearsal space for a possible global future — of fascism, post-liberal authoritarianism, militarized borders, and AI-enabled warfare —, a laboratory for an emerging world order. What, then, becomes of critical analysis and resistance under these conditions? And what becomes of aesthetics and politics?
This three-hour seminar engages in dialogue with a broader line of work on the climate emergency and decolonial perspectives developed within the Museum of the Commons project (2023–2026) of the L’Internationale network, of which the Museo Reina Sofía is a member; as well as with some of the questions that animate the study group Aesthetics of Peace and Desertion Tactics. Finally, it is also embedded in a wider strategy of support for and commitment to the artistic and discursive practices of Palestinian artists and cultural practitioners, most clearly reflected in the TEJA network.
TEJA 2026. Open Call for Emergency Art Residencies
Proposal submission until 12 January, 2026
TEJA / Red de espacios culturales en apoyo a situaciones de emergencia [Network of Cultural Spaces in Support of Emergency Situations] has the mission to promote transnational cooperation by offering temporary art residencies to artists and cultural practitioners who find themselves in complex socio-political situations in their countries of origin. During their stay in Spain, residents receive accommodation, legal and psychological counseling, and access to a network of organizations and professionals with whom they can share, develop, and continue with their creative projects. The goal is to provide a safe and stimulating environment where artists can continue their work despite adverse circumstances and generate dialogue spaces that ensure freedom of expression through joint activities both in Spain and with international collaborators.
During 2026, TEJA hosts three new residencies, each lasting three months, dedicated to supporting artists and cultural practitioners residing in the West Bank and Jerusalem. In addition, in the second half of the year, TEJA hosts three additional residencies for Gazan artists, which are offered by invitation (as Spain is currently unable to facilitate evacuations from Gaza, these invitations are coordinated through France). These residencies aim to provide a stable, creative environment and foster artistic exchange in the face of ongoing adversities. Through this new program, TEJA reaffirms its commitment to amplifying Palestinian voices and empowering artists as they navigate these turbulent times.
The selection is carried out by the TEJA network in close collaboration with each hosting partner. This year the hosting partners are: La Escocesa (Barcelona), hablarenarte / Planta Alta (Madrid), Espositivo (Madrid), Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid), Casa Árabe (Córdoba). The selection prioritizes the artist’s personal and professional situation first, and then the alignment with the practices and themes of the hosting spaces. Proposal submission deadline is January 12th, 2026, 23:59 h.