First Generation: Art and the Moving Image, 1963-1986 was born with the intention of presenting to the public, in a contextualized manner, the historic core of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía's video collection, which has been built up in recent years with the goal of laying solid foundations upon which the collection could grow.

Curated by Berta Sichel, director of the Museum's Audiovisual Department, the exhibition aims to reconstruct, via the acquired works and with the support of a small yet significant group of works on loan to cover existing gaps, a history of video which has been neglected for a long time.

The exhibition has been organized around the different approaches and ideas of the artists who worked with video during the first 25 years of this medium. These include the inspiration of Fluxus, the critique of commercial television, the relationship between the medium and the viewer, feminism, performance and the legacy of minimalism and conceptual art.

First Generation does not aspire to be a thematic exhibition, nor does it try to follow a strict chronological order. Rather, it is a global vision of how and why a technology of recording, broadcasting and reproducing sound and images, which emerged in 1950 -and technically different than cinema- became an artistic medium; a "study" of the influence technology and mass culture had on the social and artistic changes of an era, at a time when cultural acceleration and the cross-pollination of ideas was beginning. In this sense, 1968 marks a before and after in this history: for that was the year in which a portable, relatively affordable television set appeared on the market, opening this medium up to a vast new group of people.

===================

Museo Nnal. Centro de Arte Reina Sofía
Santa Isabel 52, 28012 Madrid
Tel: (+34) 91 774 10 00
Fax: (+34) 91 774 10 56