Activities

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.

Somewhere between documentary and film essay, Double Take (2009) presents Alfred Hitchcock - and his doppelganger Ron Burrage - as a paranoid history professor unwillingly trapped between archive images of the Cold War and the broadcast of a live television programme.

The works of Vasco Araújo (Lisbon, l975) focus on socio-political aspects and investigate the problematics of identity and memory using classical mythology, opera, Baroque dance, palace protocol and social behaviours.

In the words of Gilles Deleuze, everyone has his south - it doesn't matter where it is. In the imaginary cartography of the global order, the idea of south presents itself as a powerful metaphor that acts on two fronts.

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is an artist based in New York whose work emphasises socio-political reality and delves into the nature of memory. He uses language and historical narrative, availing himself of theatrical and literary resources that he then transposes into conceptual language.

Visionaries - Audiovisual Works in Latin America is an eclectic exhibition that is full of vitality and deeply committed to audiovisual creation in Latin America. The series looks at Latin American experimental video and film from Mexico to the countries of the Southern Cone in a combination of screenings and conferences that put everything from pioneers in experimental film to more recent productions under the historical lens. Organised by Brazil’s Instituto Itaú Cultural, the series consists of 73 works grouped into nine programmes.

Fragments of the East. Performance Art and Feminist Discourse (1968-1989) is a video and conference series on the origin of feminist discourse in the artistic practice in three historical contexts with no public sphere. As artists beginning within the framework of the communist dictatorships of Romania, the former Yugoslavia and Poland, Geta Brătescu (Ploiesti, 1926), Sanja Iveković (Zagreb, 1929) and Ewa Partum (Grodzisk, 1945) created works that question artistic specificity and autonomy at the same time that they allude to repressive contexts and the subject’s capacity for transformation and representation in works of art.

The films of the multifaceted Swiss artist Hannes Schüpbach (Winterthur, 1965) start from a direct encounter with a place or person and take the depiction to the limits of the metaphor. His latest works, Verso (2008) - starring his father - and L’Atelier (2007), are being screened along with Spin (2001), an earlier film with the artist’s mother.