MADRID.- On Tuesday morning this week, Museo Reina Sofía director, Manuel Segade, presented the installation HU/و´ ُه. Dance as if no one were watching you, conceived specifically for this exhibition by Galician film-maker Oliver Laxe (1982). The show is accompanied by a film programme that encompasses Oliver Laxe’s entire filmography and a carte blanche session that sees Laxe hand-pick four films, screened in the Museo’s Cinema from Thursday, 29 January next year.
Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga and Chema González have co-curated this project, in which the installation, which has a forty-person capacity and will start afresh every thirty minutes, is on view in the Museo Reina Sofía from 17 December 2025 to 20 April 2026 in the Sabatini Building’s Espacio 1: “We couldn’t wish for a better way to get the new programme in Espacio 1, devoted to exhibition cinema, off the ground than with an installation that sees Oliver Laxe return to his roots”, Manuel Segade stressed.
Laxe’s installation is underpinned by the creative process, research and recordings that culminated in the film Sirāt, winner of the Jury Prize at Cannes 2025 and chosen by the Academy of Cinematic Arts and Sciences to represent Spain in the category of Best International Feature Film at the forthcoming Academy Awards.
During the presentation of his installation, Oliver Laxe explained how he regards himself as a plastic artist with a high spatial sensibility: “The way I work in film is the same way as it is here, in the Museo. For years, I’ve been working with images and experimenting with these alternative communities, observing them in terms of the sacred, the ceremonial in dance and their relationship with wounds. The work begins today; we’re going to see what it is, what we’re going to feel, because each person will experience it differently”.
According to co-curator, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga, head of Studies at the Museo Reina Sofía, “the installation shares imagery with Sirāt, but it is also a unique piece with a radical treatment of space, because it goes to the root and contains gestures that have a force, an understated space yet one with strength, direct, where the matter of darkness modulates experience, added to an experience of awe and mystery through a spatial structure, the speaker stack and three projections which enfold, by 180 degrees, the visual field of the spectator”.
Meanwhile, co-curator Chema González, head of Film and Video at the Museo Reina Sofía, stressed how “this moving-image project arises from the convergence of two rooms, Espacio 1 and the Cinema, which will be showing, from January to March 2026, the film-maker’s four feature-length films and his early short films, which discernibly contain his concerns and restrained obsessions, as well as Oliver’s superlative carte blanche selections”.
The installation unfolds across the two rooms of Espacio 1. In the first, the visitor encounters a pyramid of speakers, akin to a rave sound system. A three-metre-tall totem which appears in the half-light and emits a continuous vibration, with no melodic variations. It serves to recall the antechambers in ancient temples: a space devised to “prime” the body and the senses before they enter the main room. In the adjoining room, three projections show desert landscapes under an implacable sun, where silhouettes of temples, speakers and dancing human figures appear. The artist filmed these images of ancient religious structures a decade previously in Iran. Thus, HU/و´ ُه. Dance as if no one were watching you is a work which guides us into a spiritual universe, where the search for transcendence starts from the
dancing, remembering body and the appearance of the sacred within the natural, architectural, sound landscape.
The sound work is created by Kangding Ray (David Letellier), who approaches this investigation from the materiality of sound. The projection, around fifteen minutes in length, is played on a loop, accompanied by the layered sound that opens out between the two exhibition spaces.
In conjunction with the exhibition, Oliver Laxe and the show’s curatorial team, Julia Morandeira Arrizabalaga and Chema González, took part in an Inaugural Conversation held on Tuesday, 16 December at 7pm in the Nouvel Building’s Auditorium 400, and organised by the Public Programmes area. The dialogue between all three explored the working processes and visual references that articulate this project, conceived specifically for the Museo Reina Sofía.
In terms of the film programme, the retrospective features his early short films and four feature-length films: Todos vós sodes capitáns (You All Are Captains, 2010), Mimosas (2016), O que arde (Fire Will Come) (2019) and Sirāt. Trance en el desierto (Sirāt. Desert Trance, 2025), all screened in the Museo’s Cinema. The film poetics of Oliver Laxe are characterised by profound spirituality, a contemplative gaze and an intimate connection with nature and the sacred, his films exploring the states of the soul, silence, minimal gestures and inner tensions within a cinematic tradition that alloys mysticism and “slow cinema”. In his films, the film-maker deals with universal themes, such as redemption and the meaning of existence, via stories that extend across remote, rural, timeless landscapes, with atmospheres that draw from western and police film genres, among others.
This retrospective is accompanied by a carte blanche session, in which Laxe has chosen four films to converse with his own filmography: Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Highway (1999), a documentary on the plains of Kazakhstan that follows a small travelling circus; Kaneto Shindo’s The Naked Island, which shows a family of four’s daily struggle on a small island; Artavazd Peleshyan’s film The Seasons (1975), an ode to the passing of time through an Armenian landscape; and Trás-os-Montes (1976), by Antònio Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, an anthropology of a Portuguese farming community and their rituals and purity of life.
