Museo Reina Sofía opens Minimal Resistance. Between late modernism and globalisation: artistic practices during the 80s and 90s on view 16 October, 2013 – 6 January, 2014.
With this selection of works from its Collection, Museo Reina Sofía takes a look at the art produced in the 80s and 90s. Unlike past presentations, contemporary art collections always set out from a necessarily fragmented position, which means that this is the first vision of new presentations that will succeed one another in the near future. On this occasion the focal point is the search by artists for spaces of resistance in a globalised world.
Minimal resistance analyses the series of dualities that polarized the period in question; from the worldwide economic crisis to financial capitalism, from the potential of the collective to the recovery of the myth of the artist, from interventions that glorify public space to the discourses that surround memory and the body, from the theatricality that emphasizes the scenographic and architectural to the language of more performative and relational models, from the rehabilitation of traditional genres to the appropriation of images from mass media and culture, clearly the tensions of the period have given rise to a multiplicity of overlapping practices and discourses, and to a renewal of the codes and languages of art.
Organised by Museo Reina Sofía within the framework of “The Uses of Art,” a project by the European museum network L’Internationale. L’Internationale proposes a new form of artistic internationalism, one that is non-hierarchical, decentralised and based on the value of difference and of horizontal exchange among the facets of a large constellation of cultural agents locally rooted yet globally connected. The network is composed of six important European museums, Moderna galerija (MG, Ljubljana, Slovenia); Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (MNCARS, Madrid, Spain); Museu d’art Contemporani of Barcelona (MACBA, Barcelona, Spain); Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA, Antwerp, Belgium) and SALT (Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey) and Van Abbemuseum (VAM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands). L’Internationale has the collaboration of associated institutions from the university and artistic worlds. www.museoreinasofia.es