Activities

Argentinian artist David Lamelas’ incorporation of the notion of duration and real time into different mediums is one of the most profound. This programme brings together the entire Time as Activity film series, in which the artist has recorded different cities at specific times, starting in 1969 and running up to the present day. The series interweaves the phenomenology of art from 1960 with the continuous, global and hyperconnected time of the intangible economy.

This series shows the films of Marcel Broodthaers as a sum of contradictions from which to understand his work as a whole, and develops the reasons for the medium’s privileged place, its investigation and filmic imaginary in contemporary art after 1970.

Within the framework of the programme Intervalos, Museo Reina Sofía screens Political Advertisement IX 1952–2016, an audiovisual project by artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese, to be shown in the run-up to the U.S. presidential elections.

Museo Reina Sofía presents, in collaboration with Filmoteca Española, a comprehensive retrospective on the film-makers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. The series, comprising works spanning from 1962 to the present day, reflects one of the most cohesive and relevant film projects in the 20^th century, whereby cinema is both an artistic form and a way of politically bursting forth in the present. Engaging in dialogue with Jean-Marie Straub, the series includes new translations of the vast majority of the films, original format screenings, remastered copies, a significant number of premieres in Spain, and a new publication featuring essays on the film-makers.       

The Intervalos (Intermissions) programme, which shows screenings of recent film work, presents a preview of Andrés Duque’s latest movie, Oleg and Strange Arts. The film moves between biography and performance, bearing witness, through moments in the life of Russian composer Oleg Karavaychuk (1927–2016), to the return of beauty that is at once eccentric, fragile and pathological.

The open-air cinema is closely linked to summer holidays: a space and time where the working class is freed from work obligations and where the chance for enjoyment and leisure presents itself. This series, screened on the outdoor terraces of the Museo, offers a journey through the history of the medium, focusing on its relationship with the conception of holidaying, leisure, travel and tourism, through which a whole range of ideas and questions that surface at this intersection are analysed.

Museo Reina Sofía presents this retrospective film-program dedicated to Cuban documentary movement around the Revolution, an Avant-garde episode in Latin America usually ignored. Together with the impulse to show a new reality and rethink the public function of the image, the documentary in Cuba merges the factual record with the aesthetics of shock and agitation of the montage, producing a unique visual manifesto.

This double performance serves as an introduction to the Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Museo. The studied disappearance of the image in modern surveillance technology is developed in a performance lecture by the artist, followed by an exploration into the new acoustic landscape of war – between military noise and sounds from consumer devices - by Kassem Mosse. Both performances are a posthumous homage to Harun Farocki.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster employs literature to explore the relationship between fiction and reality, and theatre to juxtapose an imaginary narrative of the present. This Intervalos session sees three of her films screened, including Otello 1887, a cinematic opera filmed in the Palacio de Cristal and co-produced by the Museo.

This film series presents a panoramic view of recent independent film from Latin America, while also introducing a new screening area in the Museo – the transformation of the outdoor terraces into a new open-air cinema. Scene Games offers an interpretation of the latest films from Latin American cinema, barely seen in Europe, where theatricality is the key element in approaching reality.