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October 10th and 11th, 2013
Master lecture
From world art to global art
October 10th, 2013 - 7 p.m.The plurality of art worlds and the new museum
October 11th, 2013 - 7 p.m.Global production has changed contemporary art as radically as the so-called new media had done a decade earlier. It was in the year 1989 that the idea of a global exhibition of contemporary art came up for the first time. This shift coincided with the end of the Cold War and the rise of the era of the New Economy with its multinational corporations. At the same time, the spread of worldwide biennials changed contemporary art’s geography forever. A new generation of internationally recognized artists proclaimed “coevalness” in a worldwide koine of art. Co-presence with the Western art scene replaced their non-presence, which had been a result of exclusion. Today’s art presents itself not only as new art but also as a new kind of art, an art that is expanding all over the globe. Art no longer claims for itself the avant-garde position of modern art, but presents itself as contemporary, in a chronological, symbolical and even ideological sense. Thus, 21st century art testifies to worldwide contemporaneity without limits of the kinds imposed by the Western privilege of history.
Held on 10, 11 Oct 2013
This event is part of the Museo Reina Sofía master lectures series, a public program that began in 2010 as an attempt to better understand the methodological tensions that have transformed art history in recent years. At the same time, the annual master lecture serves as the inauguration to the Museum's academic year, which consists of numerous activities related to its multiple University master's programs, independent study programs, debate forums and research residencies. In addition to these initiatives, this public activity introduces a new facet of the contemporary museum: a place for training and research.
After the master lectures given by Linda Nochlin (2010), about realism as the first language to be used by the avant-garde in its political engagement with 19th century working class struggles, by T.J. Clark (2011), about Guernica studied from the perspective of a new social history of art, and Simón Marchán Fiz (2012), which looked at the reactivation of a text as essential as his “From object art to concept art” on the 20th anniversary of its publication, this year's event has invited Hans Belting (Andernach, 1935).
This German historian is the author of a vast and highly relevant body of works that explores art history as an anthropology of images, rethinking the historiographical foundations of today's art and examining the effects of globalisation on the discourses, institutions and audiences of contemporary art practices.
Thus, publications such as Bild und Kult: Eine Geschichte des Bildes vor dem Zeitalter der Kunst (published in English in 2004 by the University of Chicago Press, as Presence and Likeness: A History of the Image Before the Era of Art) and Bild-Anthropologie (published in English in 2011 by the Princeton University Press, as An Anthropology of Images) make an inquiry into how the image is being redefined following the critique of representation. The image, claims Belting, is not really an end in itself but rather a social activity, that is, it is not determined so much by the why as by the how, by its role in public life and its function in collective identity. After this series of essays, which had an enormous influence on historians such as Georges Didi-Huberman and Dario Gamboni, Belting tackles other vectors with which to narrate contemporary art, which he differentiates epistemologically from modern art. In this way, The End of the History of Art? (published in English by the University of Chicago Press, 1987) and Art History after Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2003) deal with the dialectics between art criticism and art history, the role of the museum institution, art's new performative temporality and the fragmentation between audiences and counter-audiences, putting forward many of the concerns regarding contemporeneity not as a time but as a theoretical model.
Hans Belting's current interests include globalisation and its relationship with the new geopolitical system of contemporary art, as shown by his recent publications, such as The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (coedited, with Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel, MIT Press, 2013), and by his role as director of important research groups in this field.
Sponsorship
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On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination
Monday 27, Tuesday 28 and Wednesday 29 of April, 2026 – 16:00 h
The seminar On Black Study: Towards a Black Poethics of Contamination proposes Black Study as a critical and methodological practice that has emerged in and against racial capitalism, colonial modernity and institutional capture. Framed through what the invited researcher and practitioner Ishy Pryce-Parchment terms a Black poethics of contamination, the seminar considers what it might mean to think Blackness (and therefore Black Study) as contagious, diffuse and spreadable matter. To do so, it enacts a constellation of diasporic methodologies and black aesthetic practices that harbor “contamination” -ideas that travel through texts, geographies, bodies and histories- as a method and as a condition.
If Blackness enters Western modernity from the position of the Middle Passage and its afterlives, it also names a condition from which alternative modes of being, knowing and relating are continually forged. From within this errant boundarylessness, Black creative-intellectual practice unfolds as what might be called a history of touches: transmissions, residues and socialities that unsettle the fantasy of pure or self-contained knowledge.
Situated within Black radical aesthetics, Black feminist theory and diasporic poetics, the seminar traces a genealogy of Black Study not as an object of analysis but as methodological propositions that continue to shape contemporary aesthetic and political life. Against mastery as the horizon of study, the group shifts attention from what we know to how we know. It foregrounds creative Black methodological practices—fahima ife’s anindex (via Fred Moten), Katherine McKittrick’s expansive use of the footnote, citation as relational and loving labour, the aesthetics of Black miscellanea, and Christina Sharpe’s practices of annotation—as procedures that disorganise dominant regimes of knowledge. In this sense, Black Study is approached not as a discrete academic field but as a feel for knowing and knowledge: a constellation of insurgent practices—reading, gathering, listening, annotating, refusing, world-making—that operate both within and beyond the university.
The study sessions propose to experiment with form in order to embrace how ‘black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world.’ Through engagements with thinkers and practitioners such as Katherine McKittrick, C.L.R. James, Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, Tina Campt, Hilton Als, John Akomfrah, fahima ife and Dionne Brand, we ask: What might it mean to study together, incompletely and without recourse to individuation? How might aesthetic practice function as a poethical intervention in the ongoing work of what Sylvia Wynter calls the practice of doing humanness?
Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action
Tuesday 7, and Thursday 23, April, 2026 – 17:00 h
The online seminar Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action, curated by Sofía Villena Araya, examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question “What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.
Although the proposal is not limited to discussions of the Central American isthmus, it is framed by the particular conditions under which memory has been constructed in the region. Central America is a territory vulnerable to natural and geological disasters, marked by political violence exercised by authoritarian states and fragile institutions, a persistent colonial and imperial legacy, and the social fragmentation resulting from these factors. It is also a context in which the archive does not necessarily refer to a specific place —such as a building or documentary collection— nor does it primarily follow the protocols of a discipline such as archival science. Rather, the seminar explores how the archive operates, through art, as a dispositif that forges connections, generates forms of belonging, and opens spaces for political action.
The encounter unfolds across two sessions: the first focuses on archival practices addressing questions of memory, violence, and war; the second examines community-based practices surrounding queer and sex-dissident archives. In the face of the systematic destruction of memory, the archival practices discussed in these sessions demonstrate how the archive emerges in other spaces and according to different logics. Within this framework, the proposed space for exchange and research explores the role of art as a productive medium for constructing archives through images, affects, intimacy, performativity, the body, orality, and fiction, as well as through other materialities that challenge the centrality of the document and of writing.
Intergenerationality
Thursday, 9 April 2026 – 5:30pm
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.
The third session gazes at film as a place from which to dismantle the idea of one sole history and one sole time. From a decolonial and queer perspective, it explores films which break the straight line of past-present-future, which mix memories, slow progress and leave space for rhythms which customarily make no room for official accounts. Here the images open cracks through which bodies, voices and affects appear, disrupting archive and questioning who narrates, and from where and for whom. The proposal is at once simple and ambitious: use film to imagine other modes of remembering, belonging and projecting futures we have not yet been able to live.
Thinking with African Guernica by Dumile Feni
Wednesday 25, March 2026 - 7p.m.
Curator Tamar Garb brings together a panel of specialists from different disciplines, ranging from Art and Social Anthropology to African Studies and the History of violence, on the occasion of the first edition of the series History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, starring African Guernica (1967) by Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991). The aim of this meeting is to collectively reflect on the points of convergence between the works of both Pablo Picasso and the South African artist.
African Guernica is the monumental drawing created by Dumile Feni in the 1960s. The piece is being shown for the first time outside South Africa, in dialogue with Picasso’s Guernica (1937). This provocative physical encounter invites us to consider both artworks as anti-war and anti-totalitarian manifestos, albeit relating to different places and moments.
For this panel, Siyabonga Njica presents the artistic and cultural context of 1960’s Johannesburg, contemporary to Dumile Feni’s work. Thozama April analyses the artist’s corpus in relation to archival practices and conservation. Finally, Elvira Dyangani Ose offers a reading of African Guernica through the lens of Pan-African modernity and the collapse of the centre-periphery duality.
These events, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes department, aim to provide deeper insight into and broaden public engagement with the Museo’s Collections and temporary exhibitions.
History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica
Tuesday 24 March 2026 – 6.30p.m.
On the occasion of the exhibition History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme. Dumile Feni: African Guernica, its curator Tamar Garb, introduced by Manuel Segade, Director of the Museo Reina Sofía, highlights the opportunities for reflection offered by the presentation at the Museum of African Guernica (1967), the African sibling to Pablo Picasso’s emblematic painting. The event concludes with the live premiere of a musical composition created especially for this event by the South African artists Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng.
African Guernica, the monumental drawing produced by the South African artist Dumile Feni (Worcester, South Africa, 1942 – New York, 1991) in the 1960s, is presented for the first time outside South Africa in dialogue with Picassos’s Guernica (1937). Dumile Feni’s work is deeply connected to its place of origin, emerging from the context of state violence and institutionalised racial oppression under apartheid. Viewing both artworks side by side makes it possible to consider their shared references and strategies, their similarities and synergies, as well as the formal and figurative differences that largely result from their geographical and temporal separation.
The musical composition by Philip Miller and Tshegofatso Moeng intends to establish a parallel dialogue between traditional South African sounds and the classical repertoire for strings, voice and wind instruments. A full ensemble of performers from South Africa and Spain has been brought together for this purpose.
These inaugural conversations, which form part of the core strands of the Public Programmes Department, aim to explore in depth the content of the exhibitions organised by the Museo from the perspective of artists, curators and specialists.