Activities

In this performative lecture, artists Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens explore the realm of ecosexuality as an expanded field of queer politics. The ecosexual community is a rapidly growing community that includes artists, academics, sex workers and other entities from diverse walks of life. 

When trying to understand the impact that artistic practices have on the public sphere, people usually speak of a confrontation between art and politics. In this seminar, comprised of a lecture and a workshop, Brian Holmes takes a step beyond this dichotomy, and situates art, once again, in relation to existential affections, forms of organisation, bodies and theory. 

With his films, Harun Farocki (Czech Republic, 1944) dissects the control, representation and value systems derived from capital and its images. This event, the first of the Intervalos program, shows two recent works, one of which was produced by Museo Reina Sofía, and also includes a lecture by Thomas Elsaesser. 

In this conference, Anglo-American historian Peter Linebaugh explores the cycle of municipal occupations and urban encampments of recent years in cities including Cairo, Athens, London, New York and Madrid. Rather than discuss such events within discourses of citizenship or the public, Linebaugh considers them within the historical framework of the commons.

On Sunday, April 28, Museo Reina Sofía will be the host of a series of Dance Attacks. An initiative of the Association of Dance Professionals and the Cultural Association for Dance of Madrid, working in collaboration with Museo Reina Sofía, this activity is held in celebration of International Dance Day, which is April 29.

This conference is organised by the art research group Otros Criterios, which is linked to the History of Contemporary Art and Visual Culture master's program and to the complementary action program of the Faculty of Fine Arts, at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The event is an attempt to examine the artistic phenomenon using the subject of creation - the artist - as its point of departure. 

The new direction taken by political and social happenings in recent years has once again made public space an excellent place for manifestations by the community. In contrast with the situation during the last third of the 20th century, dissident action does not avoid urban spectacularization, hiding in private or clandestine spheres. Instead it transforms and is shown in public space. This seminar explores the use of “theatrical” gestures, behaviours and performances in social space for the purpose of expressing disagreement and dissidence, and it also examines the way that today's art, specifically theatre, has taken in and dialogued with these non-artistic theatricalities.

Three mysterious occurrences in a city haunted by images, of people known to me, and others unknown. Images abandoned by their occupants; some have become ruins. An image is invaded, a new face moves in—sometimes an ally, sometimes an old foe. One vanishes, while another travels from one picture to another

Rabih Mroué.

Closely connected to the Computing Centre, the visual poet, experimental artist, researcher, professor and writer Ignacio Gómez de Liaño is one of the essential references in Spanish art in the 1970s. This book of memories recounts that period's most important events and describes many of their protagonists. The book, the Spanish title of which is En la red del tiempo 1972 -1977, constitutes an indispensable document in any effort to understand contemporary art practices in the final years of the dictatorship.

This post-graduate course, associated with the research project "After the Republic: networks and two-way paths in Spanish art from 1931 to 1981" (National Plan for Research, Development and Innovation HAR2011-25864), is conceived as an introduction to the evolution, creation, promotion and historiographic fate of Spanish art, in times of peace and war and both within and outside the country, over a period of five decades. The period examined spans the Republic, the Civil War and dictatorship-exile.

The main purpose of universities is generally understood to revolve around teaching and research, but these institutions also have other important roles that tend to receive less attention. This event looks at the architectural and artistic heritage belonging to Spain's National University of Distance Education (UNED). The collection is brought together for the first time in this publication, which examines how contemporary art has been collected, exhibited and supported by the university as an institution.

In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault suggested that for each model of power there was a specific way of organising sexuality and reproduction and that this organisation was concentrated in institutions such as the school, the hospital or the factory. All of these are now in decline, so we must ask ourselves: What model of somatopolitial administration characterises contemporary neoliberal society, following the crisis occurring in Foucault's clinic? This lecture is the inaugural event of Somatheque 2013.

This program aims to explore the notion of avant-garde as it relates to the experience of modernity and to the shaping of the political and aesthetic vanguardia by post-war art and politics between 1920 and 1970. The specific nature of avant-garde and neo avant-garde practices, and the way in which transnational dialogue helped delineate artistic discourses in Spain and Latin America, will be the reflections guiding this event.

The recent 40th anniversary of the book Del arte objetual al arte del concepto (From object art to concept art) affords an excellent opportunity to analyse the trajectory of a book that is both a history and a manifesto of the new artistic practices in the 1970s.

This lecture looks at the interaction between narrations of social and economic recession and narrations of the visual arts crisis since the 1960s. Do these stories take place in parallel or are they a form of cultural critique? How does the economic recession shape the perception and production of contemporary art? Malcolm Bull teaches at Oxford University and is also editor of the New Left Review.

This seminar seeks to contribute to the discussion begun by the exhibition Feminist Genealogies in Spanish Art: 1960-2010 (MUSAC, León, 24 June 2012 - 23 February 2013). This exhibition, curated by Juan Vicente Aliaga and Patricia Mayayo, highlights the role of discourses concerning gender and sexual identities in contemporary Spanish art, a topic traditionally ignored by historiography. The project, in parallel with the successive rearrangements of the Museum's Collection, proposes a rereading of recent art history in Spain, with different eyes and from a different perspective, recovering the work of many female artists who have been unfairly disdained.

Eduardo Coutinho (São Paulo, 1933) is an essential name in Latin American documentary film. His work is shaped by political issues but manages to avoid propaganda, as he addresses the everyday lives and subjectivities of marginal majorities with a sensibility not altered by melodrama. This retrospective, the most extensive to date, presents a body of work that ranges from the context of Cinema Novo to the analysis of fiction in contemporary film.

This presentation introduces the publication Losing the human form. A seismic image of the 1980s in Latin America, conceived in connection to and in dialogue with the exhibition of the same name. The publication, unlike a conventional catalogue, does not enumerate the works and practices found in the exhibition but rather presents itself as yet another (possible) mechanism by which to activate these practices in a reflection about the present.

Museum curators and international specialists gather to discuss the challenges faced by cultural institutions in their endeavour to activate and disseminate contemporary art. The seminar, designed to stimulate dialogue between Europe and Latin America, centers on the search for effective means of cooperation regarding production, research, memory and education.

This seminar studies audiovisual works that use methodologies and processes of a collective nature at different levels. This seminar juxtaposes three fundamental lines of work related to the politics of collaborative practices in the field of images: the audiovisual production of new imaginaries, the participatory experiences they undergo upon reception and a pedagogy of the collective image.

Over the past thirty years, the social sciences have highlighted some aspects of contemporary social life that appear to be incompatible with traditional forms of representation and theatricality: nomadism, liquidity, ongoing identity construction, virtual communication, hyperexhibition, etc. The replacement of a theatre paradigm by a performative paradigm can be understood as a sign of transformation and liberation.

The friction of bodies is a film and video series that presents a broad panorama of different artistic and political manifestations from the 1980s, which arose during and co-existed with the years of repression in Latin America. Many of these videos and films, most of which have never been shown publicly outside of their original contexts, demonstrate the emergency of new political subjects and forms of subcultural participation. The program also includes recent film proposals that look back at the agitated times of the 1980s in this context, to offer different readings or to activate a memory still throbbing within us.

The city, the metropolis, has been presented on numerous occasions (always from the viewpoints of power and knowledge) as a living organism, a body made of physiological functions regulated according to the ideal of a harmonious composition of its parts. This course, however, sets out with the inverse hypothesis: the urban realm as an incoherent multiplicity, as a series of dynamic balances that remain unstable. 

This research and teaching program intends to examine the body as a political and cultural archive, critically distancing itself from approaches that consider the body a corpus, temple, nature, seat of sovereign power, sheath, place of residence, or property. In philosophical terms, it can be said that the modern body (healthy or sick, normal or pathological) does not have an ontological status but rather, a biopolitical and performative status.

Overshadowed by the orthodox histories of the avant-garde, the figure of María Blanchard has several aspects that have resulted in her being relegated to a secondary, and decidedly minor, position. These aspects include her condition as a woman and her distance from the prevailing cubist grammars. At this seminar Eugenio Carmona, Carmen Bernárdez, María Dolores Jiménez-Blanco, Xon de Ros and María José Salazar present some new frameworks for better understanding the artist and, at the same time, the historical avant-gardes.

The Horizons of Contemporary Art in Spain is a research initiative by Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Banco Santander and YGBArt (Rosina Gómez-Baeza and Lucia Ybarra). Conceived as a plural space for reflection and debate, its purpose is to engage in a critical diagnosis of the Spanish art scene, viewed from a variety of standpoints and bringing together many different voices.

The Open Research Zone Subtramas is a series of activities programmed in connection with an art research project exploring the processes and methodologies involved in collaborative audiovisual creation. The program features a review of past experiences, from the 1970s up through current practices. In all of them, images take part in the formation of symbolic spaces that are conducive to the collective production of emotions, subjectivities and autonomous forms of relationality.

This collection offers a broad vision of how some of the audiovisuals now being made in Spain and produced outside of the industry are responding to today's situation of change and structural crisis. It also shows how documentary images constitute one of the most lively spheres for formal experimentation and essay film in the new systems of production and distribution.

El Periférico de Objetos is a theatre group with a dramaturgical style capable of conjuring up the trauma, fear and collective unconscious of the Argentine dictatorship. With both the doll and its manipulator playing a prominent role, its dramatic works, in allusion to Antonin Artaud, Witold Gombrowicz or Heiner Müller, explore the return and liberation of a repressed body. This performance reflects the importance of El Periférico and engages in a dialogue with the exhibition Losing the human form.

One of the primary aims of this seminar is to facilitate testimony and oral discourse as a stimulant and as a counterpoint to exhibition discourse and, at the same time, to produce a debate between the artists and agents that were involved and a new generation of historians and critics that are rewriting Latin American art practices as they overflow toward a context that has more social and political activism, but that is also more subjective, identitary and sexual.