Film and Video

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.

There is no possible separation between art and life with Yayoi Kusama (Matsumoto, 1928). She was an active member in the critical art scene during the Vietnam War in the 1960s in New York, where she was also connected to minimalism, happenings and pop art. In 1973, she returned to Japan, extending the boundaries of her work. Her heterogeneous production ranges from collage to musical compositions, design, novels and installation art. Kusama obsessively develops the idea of repetition and screentone, covering surfaces with polka dots, creating what she calls ‘infinity nets’, one of her trademarks.

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.

Encounters is a programme with which the Museo looks to generate debate on its scheduled exhibitions. Temporarily coinciding with the public opening of the exhibitions, a dialogue is initiated between artists, curators, critics and historians in order to look ahead to and question the lines and set-up of each exhibition project.

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.

The artistic team PSJM, a duo formed by Cynthia Viera and Pablo San José based in Berlin, presents La Isla de Hidrógeno, a book in which a well-structured bunch of solid characters comes together in different organically related stories. The authors of the book will be joined by Miguel Cereceda, José Luis Corazón and Jesús Carrillo.

The Critical Practices Seminar aims to nurture students’ capacity for critical judgement and encourage the adoption of a standpoint through the profound knowledge of currents of contemporary thought. The seminar is structured around the reading and analysis of documents and materials submitted by each of the participating professors.

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.