Film and Video

Screening of Jeffrey Wolf’s documentary James Castle: Portrait of an Artist. The film is introduced by Ann Percy, curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and also curator of the exhibition James Castle: A Retrospective, and Lynne Cooke, assistant director at the Museo and curator of the exhibition James Castle: Show and Store.

In the midst of many changes in the area of audiovisual screening, as commercial circuits undergo a constant narrowing process, Museo Reina Sofía and ICAA (Madrid's Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts) reformulate the former as a new space for film.

The aspiration of this audiovisual series is to make meanings explode upon collision; it is an arranged disagreement between the sections and works that constitute the general program.

Los Rencontres Internationales París/Berlín/Madrid ofrecen un espacio de encuentro entre diferentes ciudades europeas, artistas y crítica, mostrando tanto ciclos como las últimas realizaciones audiovisuales de carácter experimental.

This programme is presented in conjunction with the exhibition A Hard, Merciless Light. The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939 (Museo Reina Sofía, 6 April to 22 August 2011), which analyses the history of amateur proletarian, documentary photography.

This film highlights the invisibility of global labour even in the process of production. The sea, writes Allan Sekula, is forgotten until disaster strikes. The sea, formerly the object of romantic imagination, is examined from a new angle, that of the transport of merchandise in times of globalisation.

Although they span the area between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, the film and audiovisual activities of José Val del Omar have taken place in the territory of myth. Myth as something situated outside of history, that only leads to cult status.

The film representation of the Spanish Civil War and its victims has changed over the different historical periods between 1936 and today.

The Limits of Cinema is a series of screenings, meetings and debates designed to provide a space to reflect on the nature of the cinema, its boundaries and its interactions with other forms of expression.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Bruce Conner (Kansas, 1933-San Francisco, 2008) worked in nearly every medium of the fine arts.

Suzanne Lacy (California, 1945), an American visual artist, is a pioneer in using political activism to denounce violence against women. Her early works prefigure many of the themes found in current debates on contextual and community practices, defending the role of an engaged public and the active role of the artist in the design of public policies.

The work of Cecilia Barriga (Concepción, 1957), a Chilean filmmaker residing in Madrid since 1977, maintains a keen commitment to questions of social equality and reflections on gender, questioning the way in which our individual and group identities are constructed and represented, whether through the image impulse of what is most intimate or through the changing cultural and political circumstances that surround us.

The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía presents four premieres of films that have not been screened in Spain despite their formal and discursive value and the international recognition they have received.

To mark the occasion of the exhibition Miralda. De gustibus non disputandum (24 June -11 October 2010), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is presenting three video programmes by the artist Antoni Miralda (Tarrasa, 1942) that explain his view of art in the context of the exhibition.

Jenny Marketou (Athens, 1954) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work clamours for public participation at the same time that it questions the systems that structure how we live with respect to the limits of public space and our freedom.

The Storyteller presents a group of international artists who use stories as a way to understand and convey political and social events. All of the works in The Storyteller revolve around situations that are either in the process of unfolding or that continue to impact the lives of the artists or protagonists.

During the 1970s, a time of intensive de-industrialisation and the transition to an information economy in New York, artists found new ways to use the city. The creative use of abandoned and peripheral spaces intensified, especially in Lower Manhattan, which was becoming a centre of the commercial art world. Action Behind the Margins combines debates, performances pieces and film screenings to reveal a city where public and private spheres intermingle and marginal subjects assert their right to the city.

Abigail Child (San Francisco, 1948) explores the possibilities inherent in mixing genres and narrative strategies to engage public space through memory and history.

Since the 1950s, Spain has been home to an important tradition of experimental film cut off from conventional exhibition spaces. This series was designed to give this unknown branch of film the visibility it deserves. From more than a thousand films, forty-three were chosen to be screened at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in six sessions. In order to spark a dialogue between the different eras, this vastly diverse group of seminal films was shown out of chronological order, blazing a trail through the almost unknown history of Spanish cinema.

Pedro Garhel (Tenerife, 1952-2005), a multifaceted and multidisciplinary artist, was a pioneer in the field of electronic and interactive art in Spain. He began his work in the area of performance and video art in Madrid, where in 1981 he founded the emblematic Espacio P, a multi-purpose centre managed by the artists themselves that became a meeting point between the sound, visual and performing arts.

The title Reacción en cadena applies to a selection of videos from the Cal Cego Contemporary Art Collection (Barcelona) that create genealogies of artists, works and discourses. Viewing the videos reveals the relationships, associations, counterpositions, superpositions, revisions and conflicts generated between them.

Transitland: video art from Central and Eastern Europe 1989-2009 is a project put together to mark the occasion of the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It includes a selection of one hundred works produced between 1989 and 2009 that reflect the political, social and personal transformations that occurred in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe.

Shirin Neshat (Iran, 1957) is a visual artist based in the United States whose works explore the image of women in Islamic society. She first gained recognition on an international level after the publication of her portraits included in the series Women of Allah (1993-1997) and then became more widely known in 1999 when she received the International Prize at the Venice Biennale for her video installations Turbulent (1998) and Rapture (1999).

LAX (the code for the Los Angeles international airport) is a project conceived of and produced by the Museo Reina Sofía Audiovisual Department coinciding with ARCO10, which hosted Los Angeles as a guest city. The project is divided into three sections: L.A. Films, Video Art in Los Angeles (1970-1984) and, for the first time in Spain, a retrospective on the underground California filmmaker Kenneth Anger (Santa Monica, 1927).

Leandro Katz’ work (Buenos Aires, 1938) grapples with the passage of time and the construction of memory through the politics of perception made possible by audiovisual media. Two films, El día que me quieras (1997) and Exhumación (2007), explore the icon Che Guevara from the image of the leader’s lifeless body and later story of his death.

Film at the Pamplona Encounters is a series of screenings and debates organised on the occasion of Encuentros de Pamplona 72. Fin de fiesta del arte experimental (The Pamplona Encounters 1972. End of the Party for Experimental Art), held at the Museo Reina Sofía (28 October 2009 - 22 February 2010). According to Vicente J. Benet, the Encounters “offered an overview of audiovisual media characterised by a hybridisation that may seem somewhat baffling today. The array of options for the viewers ranged from the most heterodox trends in the new video media of the time to vestiges of the earliest films, slices of the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, recent experimental films, examples of professional-quality films with ties to modern writing and independent films”.

The world is not perfect, although it can and must change to adjust to the needs of the moment and the people who inhabit it. This is the conceptual framework of Misura italiana, the video art series organised by the Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci-Prato for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Singular Multitude: The Art of Resistance is an ambitious series that includes conferences, a performance piece and a selection of audiovisual works that reflect the desire of their creators to investigate the unlimited possibilities found on the edges of official taste and the socio-political circumstances of the present day, all while recalling events, revealing traumas, mediating memory and producing counterimages in contemporary society and art.

Hunger (2008) is the first feature-length film directed by the British artist Steve McQueen (London, 1969), one of the most influential directors in the United Kingdom. The film depicts life in Maze Prison in Northern Ireland during the IRA hunger strike led by Bobby Sands in 1981. With an epic sense of detail, the film offers an opportune exploration of what happens when both mind and body are taken to the limit.