Film and Video

In celebration of International Dance Day, Dance Attacks is a series of dance actions held in different public spaces throughout Madrid. The performances, recorded and distributed through the social networks, create a set of brief choreographic actions and disruptions.

This gathering of writers and publishers is an opportunity to look at the forms of minor literature, from spaces such as Quebec, Montreal or Tangiers. Sonia García Soubriet, Jesús Egido and Madeleine Monette dialogue about landscapes of seduction and about literature as a universe of noise and silence, urban labyrinths and private refuges.

This seminar aims to show the variety and complexity in some of the debates on contemporary Spanish history. To this end, it compiles the latest research on aspects such as exhibitions, urbanism, magazines, photography and the relationship with totalitarian regimes and their outcome in the Spanish Civil War and Second World War.

Jorge Ribalta, curator of the exhibition The Worker-Photography Movement, 1926-1939, exercises a first attempt in this presentation of the historical documentation of the worker photography movement. Beyond formulating an examination of artists and unique works, his aim is to recount the constitution of public spaces through the medium of photography.

The Festival Ellas Crean 2011 is now in its seventh year. This event provides a meeting point for dialogue and expression by women creators from a wide range of disciplines, such as film, music, the visual arts, science, poetry, literature, gastronomy, comics and dance.

In his book Expresionismo. El lenguaje y construcción de la forma arquitectónica, Javier Climent argues that there is another history behind functionalism, one that reflects the legacy of the Expressionist tradition in Modernism. The book shows the less uniform side of functionalism, in which expressionism and organicism blend with rationalism.

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.

Encounters with the 1930s is a symposium that begins with a line of questions about a decade that has haunted historic and contemporary ideas about art and politics, artistic autonomy, and the pressure of context on artistic production.

This seminar is divided into four roundtables that attempt to interrogate the historical and intellectual coordinates of Warburg’s project, and then to discuss the primary questions about the nature of the image formulated in Atlas that resonate in current debates.

This book, edited by Fernando Estévez González and Mariano de Santa Ana, seeks to broaden the debate regarding archives, taking it beyond its usual reduction to such technical and operational aspects. Derived from two seminars, this publication offers a space for critical reflection, starting with different epistemological presuppositions and theoretical orientations.

Co-occurring with the public opening of the exhibition Desire Rises from Collapse, an encounter is presented between Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby and Ana Longoni, art historian and curator of the exhibition. The conversation looks ahead to and questions the lines and set-up of the exhibition project.

On the occasion of this exhibition, a conversation will take place between the artist Dorit Margreiter, Sabeth Buchmann, art historian and professor at the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and Lynne Cooke, the curator of the exhibition and deputy director of the Museo.

The first Spanish-language publication of Atlas Mnemosyne, a decisive work in art historiography and the source of important trends in methodology, from Panofsky's iconology to the modern discipline of Visual Studies, serve as the framework for this debate on its author, Aby Warburg.

El sistema del arte en España contributes to a better understanding of how the Spanish context has entered the international art system. It also contributes to forging intellectual paradigms that help describe the functioning of the new art systems appearing in other, emerging countries.

A seminar aimed at reconsidering the contemporary condition of the spectator, attempting to look over parallels that have often been drawn between audiences and society, as well as reflecting on the forms of participation that have subverted the simplistic dichotomies of identification and critical distance.

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.

Georges Didi-Huberman, the curator of the exhibition Atlas. How to carry the world on one's back?, introduces the implications of narrating history based upon the "survival" of images and how the anachronism is integrated into the exhibition of art, using analysis of and references to the ideas of Aby Warburg. 

A concert and screening by C. Raman Schlemmer via the work undertaken by Oskar Schlemmer as the director of the Bauhaus performing arts workshop. The Bauhaus dances engage in an intimate dialogue with the spatial ideas of Walter Gropius and the experiments of Kandinsky, Klee and Itten on colour and form.

On the occasion of the exhibition Val del Omar: overflow Lagartija Nick puts into practice the thesis of diaphonic sounds and the overflow of images in a concert in which noise and trance are reminiscent of the mystic and technological fantasies of the author of  Fuego en Castilla.

This show by Israel Galván, with a script by Pedro G. Romero, is a singular piece that reviews the choreographies and original pieces of the period, thereby returning sounds and oral memory to the Collection.

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 research residencies inside the Study Centre look to integrate the Museo’s visitors and workspaces and the university, bringing research time into the museum context and the relationship capacity within the academic sphere. The results of this first edition are presented in successive presentations with diverse formats.

This conference and screening explores the changes taking place in social formations and their contexts, revolving around the work of artist Yael Bartana (Israel, 1970). His work sheds light on the various forms of new communities and redefinitions of the idea of belonging.

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.

This encounter looks at the research that stems from the exhibition : VAL DEL OMAR Overflow. Eugeni Bonet, curator of the exhibition, and Javier Ortiz-Echagüe, assistant curator, present the results of work linked to the exhibit that is based on the attempts to reconstruct non-existent techniques and the recovery of unreleased work by the film-maker from Granada.

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.

This presentation explores some of the themes addressed in the last issue of Archivos de la Filmoteca, a periodical published by the Generalitat Valenciana Film Institute. The aim of this publication is to examine Guernica in the light of visual culture studies and their relationship with cinema and photography as mass communication media.

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.

Ines Doujak's performance Eviva Il Cotello (Lang lebe das Messer) intervenes the exhitibion space and discoursive realm of the The Potosí Principle. How Shall We Sing the Lord’s Song in a Strange Land? In her work, Ines Doujak examines the norms of human behaviour as structural and constituent elements of society from a decidedly feminist perspective.

Drift is Ours is a workshop of experience, reflection and debate from the perspective of pedagogy and modern utopia based in Latin America, linked to the exhibition project Drifts and Derivations. Experiences, Journeys and Morphologies. The event will consist in three workshops led by activists, architects, geographers, poets and town planners.