Mission

The Museo Reina Sofía is a public institution with the objective of producing narratives on the cultures of modernity and their impacts in the twentieth century and enabling society to gain access to present-day art; that is, to its potential for transformation and radical imagination.

While the traditional museum is made for the eye — for the contemplative gaze as an intellectual organ — the contemporary museum is conceived for the entire body, whereby any visitor possesses an awareness before works which implore them to move around the rooms or appeal to different forms of desire. Contemporary art museums do not simply become feminist or concerned with themes of gender or with ethnic, racial or economic diversity; they do not suddenly turn their interests towards specific social demands. Rather, these themes and issues are at the heart of the artistic practices that define their institutional subject, not object. The Museo has been assembled as part of the material conditions of equality, for these constituted the framework of the history of ideas and subjectivity which has given rise to the emergence of artistic practices within the contemporary system, the origins of which stretch back to the 1960s — concurrent with feminism’s second wave and its impact on the visual arts, with the birth of performance, the Stonewall riots, the class revolution of May ’68, with the final independence secured for countries under European colonial empires. Consequently, the body is a core element in the Museo: a political construction, a space of intersectional critique, a space to personally experience art, a place of social and collective experience.

As a body, the institution aspires to be a choreographic form that is open to dialogue and participation. Any form of continuity must combine with a series of ends that rightly change. To generate an ecosystem, not a hegemony, the Museo must be aware of the need for trans-scale action — heeding each scale in its biome. The eco-feminist thinker Yayo Herrero talks of how diversity is a key condition for life and its ecological principles the basis for the institutional organism: the condition of survival is interdependence.

Contemporary thought has conducted an ongoing critique of the teleological process of history, galvanising a dialectic force that is capable of producing space for all forms of difference, for every shoot of diversity. The past, of the Museo and the collections it houses, must be understood as a constellation, as an archive that is always open and in progress, one in which we find meanings that correspond to a critical present inscribing them within the same possibility of cultural co-existence. If such a museum were a literary genre, it would be speculative fiction or science fiction, a narrative where the future no longer belongs to what is to come but is being constituted instead by forces which are already here yet still unevenly distributed. The Museo is a place to verify other futures that are already here, in the right now.

A contemporary art museum is polyphonic. Extending beyond its European standing, it embraces the irrepressible diversity of bodies. This particular museum was founded in the space of a seventeenth-century hospital. And this is key: the Museo has the advantage of encompassing within its space the memory not of a place of care but a space which practiced processes of exclusion — here decisions were made, for centuries, over which lives were worthy of being saved or not — that contemporary art must rid itself of. Hauntology makes us aware today that the spectres inhabiting the spaces we conjugate are engines of artistic, political and life-based production. The ghosts that appear to disrupt contemporaneity with the obstinance of the unresolved are a central part of the Museo’s narratives. 
What is imperative when thinking about the role of this institution is reflecting on what art does to language, what art does to identity, what art does to reality. And perhaps most importantly, what it is going to be able to do for them. This is why its forms of cultural production must be understood in a way that is expanded: art, knowledge, research, texts, relations and also modes of doing. The American artist Dan Graham — whose Pavilion sits permanently in the Museo Reina Sofía Garden — said: “I think a museum is a great place to rekindle love”. And so it entails making possible, time and again, a network of affectivities which gives rise to an alluring and desired museum, interweaving its discursive power and excellence in the quality of its different presentations to a scene which, from its origins, it has contributed to forming. A place to go, not just for the sake of it but because its rhythm is part of the body itself.