Bilbao,
Vito Acconci, born in 1940 at the Bronx, worked permanently in New York until his death in 2017, but his production did move, and much, from the site: he evolved from experimental writing to conceptual art through performance, video, multimedia installation and speculative architecture. Sergio Prego, Donostiarra, resides and works for decades in that city and for six years, after 1996 and 2002, he did it as a collaborator in the Acconci study, being the only artist of a team formed by architects and engineers. Its creations would also adopt diverse forms: from sculpture to video, performance, space intervention and pneumatic architecture.
The Guggenheim Bilbao museum now gathens them again: the first exhibition that hosts this year its film & video offers, under the police station of Manuel Cirauqui, “You”, a new entanglement between the collections of the two in which ACCONCI puts the video and the performance and prego opposite). It is not about pieces raised from the distance: the purpose of the exhibition is to underline the resonances of the work of the American author in that of the Spanish and both the focus of the sculpture managed in that scenery and that of the Prego videos themselves are linked to those slopes of the work of Acconci and of Acconci Studio that they both share. These links go through their investigation of aesthetic phenomena born from the interaction of the body, and of its sensory, with architecture and with the audiovisual media, especially those derived from the attempt to lace skin and the organic in rigid structures: the videos of both part of the viewer.
Two differentiated spaces articulate “you.” In the first, a selection of prego monochanal videos are reproduced simultaneously with respect to the sound deployment, from a corner of the room, of the piece of Aconcci Tape runningfrom 1969: the latter records the sounds generated by a performance of his while he took place in Central Park; In it the artist ran while counting his steps and recorded his voice, stopping alone to recover his breath and start over. This was one of the multiple performances in which that author explored the poetic or aesthetic channel of routines, of worldly customs, by way of bringing those actions to its limit, to its maximum expression.
As for PREGO videos, these are projected in a row of analog monitors arranged along a wall and teach their collaborators levitating or carrying out impossible movements and postures. He assembles in them fixed images as if they were an animations in three dimensions through editing manipulations, with the aim of placing the public before an alternative world in which the solid fades: the perspectives multiply and the laws of physics cease to exist.
They will not be surprising for the connoisseurs of his career, in which he has frequently sought to manipulate spaces and stop times; These gathered videos, dated throughout the last two decades, are Cowboy drags with inertia and Flickerin which it used several cameras to generate each plane and produce fixed moments of tridimensional appearance, inserts in urban contexts in which the city is shown dense and impersonal; Sunoisethe registration of a sculptural installation that was composed of two fluorescent tubes connected by mechanical arms in motion, as if they were automatons; and Bisectorin which the artist’s body appeared again in tension, inside an empty apartment, and forty -five degrees on the head. The title of this work derives from trace, its body, a bisector line by dividing the right angle that forms a wall with respect to the ground.
Already in the second space of the sample, two inflatable structures of prego will be released that also work as screens to project three videos … of Aconcci: recorded performances with which the American did not intend so much self -portrait in those actions as to prolong the provocation they were looking for.
Those videos begin with Centers (1971), in which he pointed to the camera with a finger already his reflection in a video monitor offside (that is, both towards himself and who looked at him), striving to keep that finger in the center of the plane; Light (1974), in which its neck is in the foreground while a melody, in a soft and then aggressive way, until it turns, letting the entire screen occupy its face, with the eyes halfway to close but without stop speaking (its last statement is: It’s me, I don’t find any reason to make art … I’m waiting for you); And finally, the experimental piece Three adaptation studies (1970), in which he tries to physically resist three simple but uncomfortable actions: dodge balls with bandaged eyes, keep his eyes open with his face full of soap and introduce his fist inside his mouth.
The viewer has the open terrain to rethink why these videos continue to bother, five decades after their filming and at a time when social networks could have banalized their content.
“Vito acconci / Sergio Prego: You”
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
Bilbao
From April 3 to September 7, 2025
