Film and Video

The Península group is a debate platform on art, coloniality and curatorship related to Spanish and Portuguese history, their colonial processes and the latency of their power relations in the present. The group offers researchers, academics, post-graduate students, artists and those interested in this debate theme the opportunity to participate in a series of work and discussion encounters. At the core is an analysis of the role of the Iberian Peninsula in colonial processes, the visibility of representations and narrations from diverse past and present institutional spheres, in addition to the responses of artists, curators and researchers regarding some of the problems that stem from these narrations.

In his 1936 essay, The Artwork in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility, Walter Benjamin uses the Blaue Blume—the romantic incarnation of unobtainable desire—to signify the artifice and perceived immediacy of film made possible through the concealment of the cinematic apparatus.

This round table brings together the team of curators behind the exhibition Encounters with the 1930s (Museo Reina Sofía, 3 October 2012 - 7 January 2013), to give the audience the chance to learn about the research process and the dialogue that have arisen from this dynamic rereading of the 1930s, which reveals the links between the temporary exhibition and a broader reinstallation project involving the Museum's Collection, undertaken to mark the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that reflect the various facets of contemporary musical creation.

Fluxus to the People is a program of concerts, activities, guided tours, lectures and also a documentary exhibition, all of which explore the imagination of the collective, the idea of art as a community tool and the process of de-specialization of the artist figure that is at the heart of the Fluxus movement. This program has consciously been given the format of a festival. First of all, it defends the playful, participatory and even burlesque nature of many of the avant-garde manifestations from 1960 onwards. Secondly, it explores new ways of approaching contemporary art from public activity.

Once again the Museum is collaborating with Mov_s, an event directed by professionals of the moving arts, dance and contemporary creation. On this occasion the Museum provides a space in which to reflect on operations in the area of dance in Latin America today, and to share lines of thinking and experiences.

This seminar aims to reflect on new emerging political coordinates and their meaning in a globalised world. Jorge Alemán, Germán Cano and Ignacio Castro address these questions through different critical and diagnostic notions developed in recent political philosophy.

This seminar brings together Juan Manuel Bonet, Fernando Castro Flórez and José Díaz Cuyás, with the idea of questioning the construction of the recent narrations of the last few decades of art in Spain. The seminar engages in a critique of the interpretations of Nacho Criado as an artist focused on the idea of the collapse of language and on the idea of art.

A lecture by Anne Wagner, a professor emerita in the Department of Art History at the University of California. In the conference she puts forward a guide to the cosmos of artist Rosemarie Trockel, setting out from the study of a number of recent works in relation to the exhibition Rosemarie Trockel: a cosmos.

This symposium brings together a group of art historians whose work is known for its interdisciplinary approach, its innovative methodology and its relevance in meditating on the way we think about, write about and imagine art history today.

Presentation of the book La abeja y el economista (The Bee and the Economist), by Yann Moulier Bountang, co-editor of the magazine Multitudes and professor of political economy. He is one of the main people responsible for the design theory on the critique of the political economy of cognitive capitalism.

Taking as a pretext the masterpiece The Art of Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach we enter a world in which form and constructive balance represent a large part of the seduction, while never leaving behind an expressive search through the compositional formulas, processes, repetitions, calculations, counterpoint, etc, that have such a great presence in all of these works.

The Sonor Ensemble, directed by its founder Luis Aguirre, brings Auditorium 400 a program that has dance as its central axis. Six pieces by Hungarian and Spanish writers, including a new one, commissioned by the CNDM, named Danzas entrelazadas, by Madrid's José Luis Turina (1952), a piece that examines the poetics related to movement and dance.

This activity sees artist Sharon Hayes enter into dialogue with Beatriz Preciado, coordinator of the seminar Somateca, and students from the Critical Practices Programme, as well as the general public with an interest in the subject. The encounter marks the start of an individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo, entitled Habla.

On this occasion, dance leaves the conventional setting of a stage to become an integral part of the exhibition space. In this activity, young CND choreographers make a series of proposals that work with the concepts of manipulation and the search for the unknown.

Acoustic Space is a music series that brings together national and international proposals that show the various facets of contemporary musical creation. After the editions of 2011, in which musicians such as Peter Broderick, Bugge Wesseltoft, Cibelle, Oy, Mastretta and Lonely Drifter Karen, took part, Museo Reina Sofía once again lends its support to music, with an eclectic sample of proposals that attempt to draw a map of the array of trends making up today's diverse musical scene.

This event looks at the career of Raúl Zurita in a debate and then a poetry reading, both of which will take place in the Collection room dedicated to artistic activism in Latin America. This activity is also a presentation of the book Zurita, which have as a backdrop the military coup in Chile.

Rachel Haidu, professor at the University of Rochester (New York), debates the importance of staging, dramatic narration and the role of the actor in James Coleman’s work and in that of other artists influenced by his slide-tape works. This conference marks the start of the individual exhibition on the artist inside the Museo.

The presence of film in the successive re-readings of Museo Reina Sofía Collection alludes to the crisis in the distinction between hierarchies and artistic narrations, but it also points to the idea that a collection involves a network of stories, memories and times that are inseparable from film practice.

This seminar comprises some of the diverse research projects that have emerged in recent years and are geared towards questioning the hegemonic narratives that envelop the complex process of Spain’s transition to democracy. It is the outcome of a collaboration between the Museo and Brumaria.

In this talk, Haacke and the art critic and historian Walter Grasskamp look at several decades of this dialectic of tension between the artist and the museums. The dialogue consists of a diachronic examination of the artist's fifty years of production, by looking at ten works commented in relation to their different institutional models and contexts.

This first session of Somatheque. Biopolitical production, feminisms, queer and trans practices explores the changes in the governmental methods of body production and of sexual difference that took place after World War II, with the transformation of war techniques into techniques of somatic production and communication.

Gonzalo de Olavide in memoriam (1934-2005)
The prestigious director Arturo Tamayo is conducting a study and a recovery of the work of the Madrid-born composer Gonzalo de Olavide (1934-2005), and the result will be the recording of the musician's entire body of orchestral music for the label Verso.

Sound situation: Aural Drift is a program of activities focusing on the connection between sound and drift, psychogeography and aurality, including the anthropological level and the analysis and discussion of the influence and repercussions of situationist concepts (drift, construction of situations anddétournement) in the area of sound production.

The piano-mezzo soprano duo formed by Antón Cardó and Elena Gragera has a special interest in the Spanish vocal repertoire of the 20th century, as shown by their recordings of a number of Robert Gerhard's songs for voice and piano.

All About Love, a title borrowed from the film of the same name made by Ann Hui (Anshan, 1947), sums up the subject matter of this Chinese filmmaker's work, which usually revolves around social and personal relationships and has a great deal of affective and emotional content.

For the eighth edition of the Festival Ellas Crean, vocalist Fátima Miranda has designed a specific programme entitled deCantar, which includes the work Albórolas, recently awarded first prize at the National Competition of Video Art by Female Artists from a Gender Perspective.

This seminar intends to build a constellation of critical gazes regarding modern art in Latin America. It hopes to serve as the critical substratum that will help shape plans for the exhibition of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection (CPPC) of modern art that Museo will be organizing in 2013.

How to give feminist film its own voice against the conventions of classic film and how to maintain the subaltern nature of this voice?

Jacobo Durán-Loriga (1958) takes on another of the commissions proposed by the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM), which will be performed by the Madrid-based group Modus Novus, directed by Santiago Serrate.

This conference presents recent examples of the work of the Radical Education collective, whose research deals with political imagination in art. The research process they put forward includes collective translations of Marx’s A Worker’s Inquiry, with the aim of questioning new modulations and regulations of work.

The Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM) is committed to strengthening the Spanish repertory of string quartets, as one of the most important and richest channels of musical creation of recent years. To this end, it has commissioned a new piece by the master Antón García Abril, one of the most outstanding composers of his generation.

The CNDM has offered one of its 15 commissions to the Gijón-born composer Juan José Eslava (1970), who divides his time and career between Japan and Madrid.

The public presentation of the Julián Díaz Sánchez research residency. This project analyses Spanish Informalism in relation to the exhibition New Spanish Painting and Sculpture, held in New York’s MoMA in 1960.

Reactivate/reinterpret brings together a varied group of specialists from different fields with the idea of analysing the place of performative practices within the realm of contemporary art museums. The series is comprised of various public lectures, workshops with the students of the Study Centre and two art interventions, by Jerôme Bel and Falke Pisano.

Founded in 2008, the young Granada-based group Neoars Sonora will be at the Centro Nacional de Difusión Musical (CNDM) to give the premier performance of two new works: Quasi una serenata by Jorge Fernández Guerra and Aleph, for voice, violin, cello and piano, by the Gerona-born composer Iluminada Pérez.

This performance, organised in connection with the exhibition Locus Solus. Impressions of Raymond Roussel, is a unique opportunity to see the work of Guy de Cointet in the context for which it was conceived, somewhere between the theatre and the museum. Put on by the Dutch company If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution, the two plays are the result of a long research process related to the complexity of re-staging.

This presentation by Ángel González, Eva Rivas, José Luis Gallero and José María Parreño explores the life and work - inseparable from one another - of Quico Rivas. Cómo escribir de pintura sin que se note [How to write about painting without anybody noticing] is the name of a collection of critical texts written by the critic in the final years of his life.