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June 9, 2015 Nouvel Building, Study Center
Marcel Broodthaers. Research Seminar
Attendance: free admission by writing to centrodeestudios@museoreinasofia.es indicating your interest and training. The seminar will be held in English without simultaneous interpretation. Limited places.
In 1968 Marcel Broodthaers founded the Museum of Modern Art. Department of Eagles, a museum with no collection and no definitive location, divided into different sections reflecting, through art reproductions, daily objects and images, the iconography of power in its clearest manifestation. In 1970, he added the “Financial Section”, the function of which was to sell the museum by destabilising market prices. Broodthaers appeared to envisage the catastrophic reverse of the current modern art museum: an institution devoted to exhibiting and certifying the miracle of the transformation of nothing into the unimaginable accumulation of value. Is it possible, in light of the Belgian’s work, to counter this model with the one in which the museum is an institution that inherits the illustrated public sphere? Is it possible to imagine another affirmative and critical museum that structures and deconstructs its public and counteracts the logic of the fully integrated museum?
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June 10, 2015 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200
From Birkenau to Dresden: Memory in the Abstract Works of Gerhard Richter
Attendance: free, until full capacity is reached
Gerhard Richter’s most recent work, entitled Birkenau, is inspired by the publication of four photographs secretly taken by prisoners at Auschwitz and subsequently published by the French art historian Georges Didi- Hubermann in his book Images in Spite of All (2004). Richter’s group of abstract works, after being reformulated in the space of a year, were duplicated and digitised and installed this year in Dresden, the artist’s hometown, for the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Connecting his city with the history of German Nazism, precisely in the most notorious location of destruction caused by Allied bombing, once again Richter places his spectators before the height of mnemonic challenges, with an unmanageable past and a continued reflection on human brutality in the 20th century and in the present.
Benjamin Buchloh
From Birkenau to Dresden: Memory in the Abstract Works of Gerhard Richter
Held on 09, 10 Jun 2015
Started in 2010, the Museo Reina Sofía’s programme of master lectures marks the beginning, or end, of the annual academic activity conducted in the Museo, comprising a series of MAs, study programmes, debate groups and research residencies, run in collaboration with different universities.
Following the previous master lectures, which looked to recognise the methodological tensions that have transformed art history in recent years, by Linda Nochlin (2010), T.J Clark (2011), Simón Marchán Fiz (2012) and Hans Belting (2013), this year’s edition is centred upon Benjamin Buchloh.
On this occasion, it will be split into two sessions to focus on two artists and two modes of production that have characterised the work of the German historian, found between critique and the university. One is a research seminar on Marcel Broodthaers and the other a public lecture focused on Gerard Richter.
Education programme developed under the patronage of
Participants
Benjamin Buchloh is editor of the journals Interfunktionen (1969–1975) and October (since 1990) and Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Art from the Department of Art History and Architecture at Harvard University. His work has keenly recovered the critical legacy and structural challenge of artists such as Marcel Broodthaers, Michael Asher, Dan Graham and James Coleman. The essays compiled in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (The MIT Press, 2000) are characterised by their analysis of the return to the idea of the Avant-garde in changing post-war capitalism and their pivotal definition of the so-called institutional critique as a driving force behind conceptual practice in contrast to the culture managed by cultural institutions in the same epoch. By the same token, the tension between opposing historiographical categories dominates both Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art (2004), (Akal, 2004) and Art Since 1900: Modernity, Antimodernity, Postmodernity (Akal, 2006, co-edited with Rosalind Krauss, Yve Alain Bois and Hal Foster). The deeply held conviction in the critical and resistant role of the museum and contemporary art in the trivialisation of entertainment is one of the defining traits of Benjamin Buchloh’s writing and thinking.
Más actividades
Dear Americas
Friday 29 May and 5 June, 2026
In these films, Marilú Mallet travels to Solentiname, in Nicaragua, and Andahuaylillas, in Peru, to paint a portrait of communities which resist the severity of forced industrialisation. In Solentiname, the focus is on the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s founding of a Christian, poetic and revolutionary utopia, while in Andahuaylillas, a town close to Cuzco, Mallet explores the multiple layers of Andean culture.
A Poetics of the Subject
Thursday 28 May and 4 June, 2026
In the tension between documentary and fiction, between the rawness of a tragic political present and narrative escape, lies the truth of the exile’s condition. In Journal inachevé (Unfinished Diary, 1982) Marilú Mallet experiments with her own subjectivity, moving from affirmation to doubt. In Double Portrait (2000), María Luisa Señoret paints her daughter Marilú, who records the process. In this circular relationship, the film-maker constructs a poetics of the portrait as something perpetually unfinished, a process of exploration in which memory, identity and political history merge to become blurred.
Institutional Decentralisation
28 MAY 2026
This series is organised by equipoMotor, a group of teenagers, young people and older people who have participated in the Museo Reina Sofía’s previous community education projects, and is structured around four themed blocks that pivot on the monstrous.
This fourth and final session centres on films that take the museum away from its axis and make it gaze from the edges. Pieces that work with that which is normally left out: peripheral territories, unpolished aesthetics, clumsy gestures full of intent. Instead of possessing an institutional lustre, here they are rough, precarious and strange in appearance, legitimate forms of making and showing culture. The idea is to think about what happens when central authority is displaced, when the ugly and the uncomfortable are not hidden, when they are recognised as part of the commons. Film that does not seek to be to one’s liking, but to open space and allow other ways of seeing and inhabiting the museum to enter stage.
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities
Tuesday, 26, and Wednesday, 27 May 2026 – Check programme
Ordinary, Common and Public. Common Fixes for Ordinary Communities is the title of the fourteenth encounter run by Sociología Ordinaria, a transdisciplinary research group that explores daily knowledge deemed ordinary, superficial or frivolous from a traditional academic and intellectual viewpoint.
This latest edition seeks to approach and map connections between concepts of the commons and the public realm — remembering that the ordinary is also the commons — and to ensure affects and moods of discontent are mobilised towards hope.
By way of its multiple declinations — community, community-based practices, the commons, the communal — the encounter seeks to reflect on different ways of creating, (re)configuring, maintaining, fixing, arranging, caring for and defending the public realm and the commons. Furthermore, it explores forms of invocation and experimentation as tools opposite the helplessness of an uncertain present, in addition to resistance against attempts of expropriation, distortion, privatisation and touristification.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge
26 MAY 2026
Nancy Spector and Alejandro Cesarco, curators of the exhibition Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Sweet Revenge, will speak with Manuel Segade, director of the Museo Reina Sofía, in a session dedicated to exploring the interpretive frameworks of this first large-scalepresentation in Madrid of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996), whose practice continues to resonate in the present.
The conversation begins with the exhibition’s title itself, Sweet Revenge, understood as a paradoxical notion that articulates much of the artist’s thinking. From there, the tensions running through his work are explored: the coexistence of opposing registers, ambiguity as a method, and the simultaneously affective and political charge of his works.
The dialogue also touches on some of the themes that run through his body of work, such as thenotions of identity, citizenship, and authority, alongside experiences linked to the AIDS crisis, and emotions such as love, loss, grief, and optimism. Special attention is given to the way in which Gonzalez-Torres shifts languages associated with Arte Povera, conceptualism, and minimalism towards open, participatory, and deeply personal structures.
The session also includes a reflection on the research process that shaped the exhibition, providing context for the curatorial decisions and criteria that structure it. In this context, Gonzalez-Torres’s work emerges as a device that actively engages those who activate orinterpret it, distributing responsibility for the production of meaning—a process that is alwaysunstable and constantly under negotiation.
These inaugural conversations, part of the main working strands of the Museo’s Public Programmes Area, aim to explore in greater depth the exhibition narratives of the shows organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.