Performance. Laibach. We Forge The Future

Laibach in the XII Music Bienal, Zagreb 1983. Photography: Ranko Borovecki

Within the framework of the exhibition NSK from Kapital to Capital. Neue Slowenische Kunst. An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia, the Museo Reina Sofía presents We Forge The Future, a performance by the industrial rock band Laibach, who formed in 1980 and is one of three landmark groups making up the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst).

This performance, the first since it was initially staged on 23 April 1982 as part of the programme for the XII Music Biennale Zagreb, will see the band put together multimedia visuals with ten monitors showing the band’s experimental video Morte ai s’ciavi (Death to the Slaves, 1983) to a backdrop screening Milan Ljubić’s propaganda film Revolucija još traje (The Revolution Goes On, 1971), celebrating the achievements of socialist Yugoslavia. At certain points, running alongside archive sequences of Tito’s speech featured in Ljubić’s film, pornographic scenes from Laibach and Marijan Osole-Max’s film Documents of Oppression no. 2 (1983) will be superimposed and overlap. The combination of these images caused a huge scandal at the time as the authorities cleared out the room in which the activity was taking place and later started a media campaign against the band, which was banned in Slovenia until 1987.

Date: Sunday, 26 November, 2017
Location and hour: Sabatini Building, Auditorium at 7.30 p.m.
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
Within the framework: The uses of Art of L’Internationale
Price: free admission, with prior ticket collection at the Museo Ticket Offices from 20 November. A maximum of two tickets per person.

Film series. Adam Curtis. A Natural History of Power

Adam Curtis, The Power of Nightmares. Episode 1: Baby It’s Cold Outside, 2004. Film

This series compiles, for the first time, a major part of Curtis’s work, spanning feature films, series and short clips reassembled from the vast BBC archive. The films, remastered in new versions made especially for this film season, are accompanied by a masterclass, two carte blanche (‘blank pages’) sessions orchestrated by the director and a series of presentations given by culture theorists. Adam Curtis often insists he is a journalist, not a film-maker or an artist, asserting that his work involves crafting a new analytical and critical model of information and reportage by searching through the discursive and visual montage of images to narrate ideas that emerge in such unhinged times. In excavating archives from the BBC, for whom he makes his films, Curtis deploys an endless stream of contemporary images, writing an account that maps out how certain notions, stories and connections, however unlikely, determine and govern us in the present day.

Dates: From November 6 to December 28, 2017
Location and hours: see the full programme
Organized by: Museo Reina Sofía
Curated by: Chema González