Glenda León and the depth of sound. in Azkuna Zentroa

While Félix González-Torres and his lyrical and minimalist installations await us at the Reina Sofía Museum thirty years after his death, the artist who, perhaps, has best taken up her witness in addressing issues with political or environmental implications from a grammar that is at once sober and poetic offers one of her most extensive exhibitions so far at Azkuna Zentroa, in Bilbao.

“A Tree Falls in the Forest” has been curated by Fernando Pérez, Iván de la Nuez and Glenda León herself and offers us, until September, a tour of pieces that we can understand as metaphors and that are born from slow observation, even from scientific exploration.

We are talking about photographs, paintings, installations or video creations with which this Cuban author, who has lived in Spain for fifteen years, delves into different tensions characteristic of contemporary life, underlines what nature has as an interconnected system of which we are part or refers to the space that we grant to spirituality after the first decade of the 21st century. He also does so, often, intertwining his plastic proposals with features of music, dance or literature; also challenging the tendency to look quickly through games of opposites – what is created by the human hand and what is not, what sprouts and what falls, the colorful and the austere – and continually introducing subtle humor.

There are very many of his works that appeal to the musical and, through scores, invite us to listen to the seasons, the cities, the rain, chance or the flight of birds: it is never an anecdotal listening, since for León this goes far beyond the physical act to become a form of consciousness. Thus, among the sounds that interest him most is that of silence, almost a requirement to not stop perceiving the invisible, the spiritual or the political when we are victims of the constant external noise and our own executioners when we spur the internal one.

The title of this exhibition, along these lines, refers to the philosophical experiment around sound studied as a physical phenomenon, objectively, or subjectively through that discipline. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, the sound is produced – it does not require spectators to occur – but from philosophy or neuroscience it would not be relevant, because from the perspective of these branches of the study of the mind the sound is not only the physical wave, but the sensory experience of being processed by a brain. Thus, without a listener, there would be vibration in the air, but no sound as such.

For Glenda León, that fallen tree It could symbolize current society and its future, in need of renewed listening that gives them meaning, of a gaze that also seeks the hidden and of individuals whose perception mechanisms are tools of knowledge, and not only of empirical verification. Thus, this author’s tree would fall to make us see the forest.

The exhibition is structured through different thematic spaces that relate to each other and that, in different ways, question our ways of understanding and inhabiting what is given.

Sometimes, part of politics and society; Political world, Playing field either summer dream They refer to ideological polarization, the tentacles of power, censorship, the ambiguities of progress and the way in which exported conflicts penetrate both the intimate and collective relationships. Glenda León is not interested in either raising or resolving them from a dogmatic perspective, but rather insisting that every issue actually presents more layers of interpretation than those initially apparent.

For its part, Butterfly effect, About the invisible either Outlines of the world They allude to the distances between what we see and what we believe we see, a matter that also underlies The world performed for pianoa piece in which the names of the gods, written in Braille, become scores performed on that instrument. The graspable and the ungraspable, the audible and the inaudible, converge to make us experience new sensations.

Finally, we will consider Celestial bodies, Travel light either Mirageinstallations that synthesize their concerns and that precede Conversiothe final piece of the exhibition and one of the artist’s most recent. It is a performance/installation conceived as a proposal for a great dialogue between cultures, circumstances and ways of seeing the world in our time.

This project, which is completed with Talking to God and with the audiovisual Suspensionin other spaces in the center, constitutes the artist’s first solo exhibition in Bilbao, but León has already visited Azkuna Zentroa: in 2019 she participated in the group exhibition “Never real/Always true”, along with a dozen creators who do not build walls between art and the word.

Glenda Leon. “A tree falls in the forest”

AZKUNA ZENTROA

Arriquibar Plaza, 4

Bilbao

From June 18 to September 27, 2026