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November 11, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 1. Video Condition
David Cronenberg. Videodrome
Film, 1982. In English with Spanish subtitles, 87’
Using conspiracy as an explanation for the present is a common mechanism in a cinema which, according to Fredric Jameson, is incapable of describing the powers and institutions of the new political scene. In Videodrome, Cronenberg plays a part in this situation, showing how a sect seeks to gain control by broadcasting television programming that features violence and pornography, and that not only affects the viewers' desires but also their perception of the world. The ideas of simulation, implosion or crisis of the real, which are predominant in this decade, appear in this film. At the same time, Videodrome describes a paradox: film approached from the perspective of video, or video, the decade's most significant medium, introduced through film. -
November 14, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 2. Parodies of the subject
1980s television proposals
Jaime Davidovich. The Live! Show
Video, 1979-1984. In English with Spanish subtitles. 40’
Dara Birnbaum. MTV Artbreak
Video, 1985-1987. In English, 30’’
Doug Hall, Chip Lord y Jody Procter. The Amarillo Tapes
Video, 1980. In English with Spanish subtitles, 25’52’’
General Idea. Shut the Fuck Up
Video, 1984. In English with Spanish subtitles, 14’
Antoni Muntadas. Video Is Television?
Video, 1989-1990. 5’34’’
Television, the protagonist of a large part of the associative and guerrilla experiences of 1970s artistic practices, becomes a homogenizing medium in terms of information and audiences during the 1980s. This session is dedicated to analysing how different artists negotiate this idea. Artists show a fascination for the immediacy, massive reception and new formats offered by television, and at the same time they reproduce the stereotype of a satirical and unidimensional subject trapped in the television spectacle. Thus, collaborations with general networks, such as those undertaken by Dara Birnbaum, Richard Prince and Lynda Benglis with MTV, end in frustration, while the experiences such as those of General Idea or Jaime Davidovich criticize the medium, appropriating its logic. Both cases anticipate a new territory, one that is complex and inevitable: the relationship between art and cultural industries. -
November 18, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 3. The artist of the cynical reason
Fischli & Weiss. The Least Resistance
Video, 1980-1982. In German with Spanish subtitles, 30’
Andrea Fraser. Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk
Video, 1989. In English with Spanish subtitles, 29’
Martin Kippenberger. Entrevista de Kippenberger con Roberto Ohrt
Video, 1993. In French with Spanish subtitles, 6’35’’
Rodney Graham. Vexation Island
Video, 1997. 10’
Rodney Graham. How I Became a Rambling Man
Video, 1997. 10’
This session reflects a series of critical and satirical strategies developed in response to an art system lacking external projection. Incapable of articulating an effective intervention that transforms the circulation and reception of art, artists use the resources of modernity, knowing paradoxically that the aims pursued by modernity are no longer possible. Fischli & Weiss give a carnivalesque performance in which their alter egos, the characters Rat and Bear, use caricature to describe how the art market works. Institutional critique, common in the 1970s, is shown to be limited and to have run its course, in the theatricality used by Andrea Fraser. Kippenberger, enfant terrible like none other, mocks exhibition rituals in a liberation revealing more melancholy and indifference than subversion. Rodney Graham, in the 1990s, puts experimental film resources (such as the loop and the film apparatus) to work against themselves. -
November 24, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 4. Where is the West?
Béla Tarr. Sátántangó
Film, 1994. In Hungarian with Spanish subtitles, 450’
At a time in which cinema stands out for no longer being cinema, Béla Tarr represents a search for truth, using the idiosyncrasies and traditions of the medium itself. His realism, closely linked to the material, produces contemporary allegories for a time which, following Jacques Rancière, is no longer that of the present. A turning point, Sátántangó has been compared in importance to Germany, Year Zero (Roberto Rossellini, 1948). The film portrays a moment of moral debacle resulting from the failure of a communal experiment, that of a collective farm in post-Communist Hungary. Lasting over seven hours, the film is a tragic and poetic defence of cinema as a historical monument. It therefore not surprising that Susan Sontag described it as devastating, enthralling for every minute (…), I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life. -
November 25, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 5. Globalisation and territory
The new order after ’89
Paper Tiger Television. Lines in the Sand. Chapter of the series The Gulf Crisis TV Project
Video, 1990. In English with Spanish subtitles, 28’Hito Steyerl. The Empty Center
Video, 1998. In German with Spanish subtitles. 62’
Jasmila Žbanić. After, After
Video, 1997. In Bosnian with Spanish subtitles, 16’
Ursula Biemann. Writing Desire
Video, 2000. In English with Spanish subtitles, 23’
Hito Steyerl. Mini Europa
Video, 2004. 3’42’’The year 1989 marks the arrival of a new social order all over the world. The fall of the Berlin Wall leads to the end of the communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, with decisive events such as the Rumanian revolution and the disintegration of the ex-Yugoslavia. In Latin America long-standing dictatorships come to an end and democratic elections are held, while in China, still underestimated economically and politically, the student massacre at Tiananmen Square takes place. In this new geopolitical reality, still churning and uncertain, the undisputable primacy of the United States is mixed with a series of emerging powers, and policies of economic and arms colonization come into play, as the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War demonstrate. A number of artists question this new territorialisation of ideology, in the words of Hito Steyerl, in narrations tied to documentary. This session contains various proposals of this nature: one episode of Paper Tiger Television about oil as a political axis, works by Ursula Biemann and Hito Steyerl on the new class differences in the neoliberal global scene, and by Jasmila Žbanic on the recovery of memory. As an epilogue, a short piece by Steyerl shows a model of the Berlin Wall in a theme park in Brussels, being demolished over and over again.
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November 28, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 6. No Wave
Community and subcultures
Vivienne Dick. Guerrillère Talks
Video, 1978. In English with Spanish subtitles, 25’Scott and Beth B. G-Man
Video, 1978. In English with Spanish subtitles, 28’
David Wojnarowicz. Heroin
Video, 1981. In English, 3’
Eric Mitchell. Underground U.S.A.
Film, 1980. In English with Spanish subtitles, 75’
During the urban decline of New York City, between the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, a series of alternative attitudes and communities arise in the margins. In them artistic experimentation becomes a form of social relations and also of subjective identification. Against this backdrop No Wave appears, a broad movement consisting of filmmakers, musicians and artists who reject the categories of cultural consumerism (in contrast to the New Wave phenomenon) and instead approach artistic production as an uncontrollable life experience. The No Wave movement is representative of different factors specific to the 1980s: activism based on associationism (inseparable from the creation of independent social centres and venues, such as ABC No Rio), the importance of self-production, personalties and the poetics of care-giving in times of extreme conservatism, and the role of music and music scenes as communicating vessels linking film, video, performance and the visual arts. -
December 2, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 7. Attitudes of denial in the Spanish context
José Ramón Da Cruz (Grupo TAU: Da Cruz, Valdés and Cebrián). Gran Puk
Video, 1982. In Spanish, 22’50 ''
La Edad de Oro. Entrevista y actuación de Parálisis Permanente
Video, 1983. In Spanish, 10’
La Edad de Oro. Entrevista y actuación de Glutamato Ye-yé
Video, 1983. In Spanish, 30’
Siniestro Total and Poch. Dios salve al lehendakari
Video, 1986. In Spanish, 3’13”
Xavier Villaverde. Alicia en Galicia Caníbal
Video, 1987. In Spanish, 11’
Agustín Parejo School. Málaga Euskadi Da
Video, 1986. In Spanish, 13’25”
This session presents a set of manifestations related to post-punk as a case study of the situation in Spain. Traditionally interpreted in relation to the movida madrileña, these interventions show a counterpoint to affirmative celebration and are characterised by the outbreak of violence and denial. With a continual music soundtrack, the session shows the incipient subculture ambience in Spain in the period between the country’s transition to democracy and the consolidation of its current democratic system, as well as different collective manifestations that distance themselves from the officialization of counterculture and offer a critique of the future State of autonomous communities. -
December 5, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 8. Self as sign
Feminism of difference
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Reassemblage
Film, 1982. In English with Spanish subtitles, 40’Sadie Benning. Jollies
Video, 1990. In English with Spanish subtitles, 11’
Su Friedrich. Sink or Swim
Film, 1991. In English with Spanish subtitles, 48’
The expansion of neo-conservatism that characterises the 1980s at the international level brought the end of the so-called second wave feminism, known for the intense feminist activism that dominated the two preceding decades. However, in contrast to this apparent retreat, there arises a feminist theory based on the impossibility of developing a universal category of “woman,” which is translated into the emergency of a series of practices focussing on the visualisation of non-normative sexualities or on racial difference, influenced by post-colonial theory. The three films in this session play with the idea of identity as a performative construction, and thus Jollies and Sink or Swim propose an autobiographical narrative while Trin T. Minh-ha, in something near linguistic ethnography, describes how the gaze outwards can be an encounter with oneself. -
December 12, 2013 Sabatini Building, Auditorium
Session 9. Images without moralism
AIDS and representation
David Wojnarowicz. A Fire in My Belly
Video, 1986-1987. 20’55’’Dereck Jarman. Blue
Film, 1993. In English with Spanish subtitles, 20’55’’
This session presents two divergent voices in the representation of the 1980s and 90s pandemic. David Wojnarowicz, an artist linked to the No Wave, made this video the same year that his partner, Peter Hujar, died of AIDS, and he himself found out that he was infected. Still censured in recent showings in the United States, A Fire in My Belly is a cry from the most abject, scopic violence, offended bodies, blood and injury. On the other hand, the filmmaker Derek Jarman presents in Blue, his last film before dying of the illness, a contained and poetic vision with an autobiographical tone. Blue shows a saturated blue screen that submerges the spectator in the blindness that the virus caused in the filmmaker, while his off-screen voice reflects on the health policies of the Thatcher government and makes oblique references to his life. Despite their differences, the two works share an idea put forward by Douglas Crimp, that of being images free of moralism with respect to AIDS.
Held on 11, 14, 18, 24, 25, 28 nov, 02, 05, 12 dic 2013
This audiovisual series looks at the 1980s, and that decade’s prolongation into the 1990s, as a genealogy of much of the dialectics that explain the contemporary, as a time period and cultural category. The 1980s have traditionally been considered in terms of market extension and as the articulation of a pensive, self-referential artistic sphere. Hence, the appeals to the final moments of identity-centred historicism, appeals that are visible in the returns to painting in Europe, or to the theses of the end of history as a justification of global neoconservatism, have resulted in this decade being considered through the paradigms of spectacle and banalisation.
Without completely rejecting it, The image is a virus confronts and qualifies this thesis. Taking as its starting point a reference to William Burroughs, a decisive writer for the interests and themes of this decade’s counterculture, this series compares the idea of the image as contagion and transmission to the diagnosis of implosion and banalisation that dominates the theoretical analyses of the post-modern image. In doing so, The image is a virus does not seek to replace one paradigm by another, but rather to present the 1980s as a decade that was, more than spectacular, decidedly bipolar, characterised not by the predominance of great narratives but by a series of unresolved tensions that will dominate the constitution of the contemporary period. The series, which accompanies and expands upon the discourse of Minimal Resistance, aims to show over its nine sessions some of these contradictions: in contrast with an all-embracing institutionality, the formation of artistic activisms and collectivisms; in contrast with the specificity of art, its blurring into ways of life mixed with music as an experience and form of resistance; in contrast with the globalisation starting in 1989, the territory as a place of reconstruction and memory; in contrast with the return to the myth of the artist, a tragicomic parody of the artist trapped within the art system.
In short, The image is a virus undertakes a revision of the 1980s and its echoes, doing so from the perspective of some of its fractures, showing a decade characterised by a series of narratives in constant tension.
This series is the second edition of the program of Histories of cinema, which looks at how the discourses of the Collection are seen in film. Organised by Museo Reina Sofía within the framework of “The Uses of Art,” a project by the European museum network L’Internationale.
Curatorship
Cristina Cámara, Chema González and Lola Hinojosa
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
The Joaquim Jordà Residencies 2025
Friday, 7 November 2025 - 7pm
In this activity, the recipients of the 2024–2025 Joaquim Jordà Residencies call, María Aparicio (Argentina, 1992) and Andrés Jurado (Colombia, 1980), present respective projects related to their body of work in an open session in which to discover the creative interests of two of the most up-and-coming independent film-makers in Latin America today.
María Aparicio presents the working process behind her film De sol a sol (From Sun to Sun), along with a brief journey through the films prior to this project and her filmic searches in recent years. Aparicio synthesises the storyline of De sol a sol from the silhouettes of a group of men who appear between the stalks of a reedbed. Their knives glisten as the sun hits them, flashing and disappearing with their hand movements. Apprentices split the canes using no method; seasoned workers cut with skill. They are workers from a sugar mill in northern Argentina and are watched by Juan Bialet Massé, accompanied by Rosich, assistant and photographer. It is Argentina in 1904 and he is carrying out a mission assigned to him by his country’s government: to travel the Argentinian provinces, reporting on the state of the working classes.
Andrés Jurado, for his part, will look over his own work and the work of the La Vulcanizadora lab in this session. He will also open the archive stemming from the research process in the project Tonada, a journey through the succession of peace agreement betrayals in the history of Colombia. From the colonial era, understood in tumultuous terms, as a hurricane that keeps swirling, to the present day he traces the stories of people like Tacurrumbí, Benkos Biohó, Bateman and the many women and men who were betrayed by governments and oppressors. Tonada seeks to build a sound and film dialogue between the guerrilla disarmament of 1953 and the period following the peace agreement of 2016, invoking these and other events and confronting traumas of betrayal through a film composition devised to be sung. But what is sung? Some of these songs are heard and voices are shared in this presentation.
The Joaquim Jordà Residences programme for film-makers and artists was set in motion by the Museo Reina Sofía in 2022. The initiative comprises a grant for writing a film project rooted in experimentation and essay, as well as two subsequent residencies in FIDMarseille and Doclisboa, international film festivals devoted to exploring non-fictional film and new forms of audiovisual expression.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
![Carol Mansour y Muna Khalidi, A State of Passion [Estado de pasión], 2024, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/palestine%20cinema%20day%202.jpg.webp)
Palestine Cinema Days
Sábado 1 de noviembre, 2025 – 19:00 h
The Museo Reina Sofia joins the global action in support of Palestine with the screening of A State of Passion (2024), a documentary by Carol Mansour and Muna Khalidi. The film features in Palestine Cinema Days Around the World, an annual festival, held globally every November, which aims to show films made in Palestine to an international audience. The initiative was conceived as a form of cultural resistance which seeks to give a voice to artists from Palestine, question dominant narratives and create networks of solidarity with the Palestinian people.
Palestine Cinema Days Around the World originates from Palestine Cinema Days, a festival organised in Palestine since 2014 with the aim of granting visibility to Palestinian cinema and to support the local film community. In 2023 the festival was postponed because of the war in Gaza, and has since become borderless in scope, holding close to 400 international screenings in almost sixty countries in 2024. This global effort is a show of solidarity with Palestine and broadens the voices and support networks of the Palestinian people around the world.
A State of Passion exposes the atrocities committed against the Gaza population via the testimony of Dr Ghassan Abu Sittah, a Palestinian-British plastic surgeon living in London who decides to return to Gaza and save lives in the city’s hospitals amid the Israeli army’s indiscriminate bombing of the population. A necessary film exposé of the experience of unrelentingly working twenty-four hours a day for forty-three days in the Al Shifa and Al Ahli Hospitals in the city of Gaza.