Barbara Kruger, the shock of words, the weight of ideas

Bilbao (Spain). A Barbara Kruger exhibition is not forgotten. After the MoMA (New York) in 2022, the Serpentine Gallery in London and the Aarhus Kunstmuseum Aros in Denmark in 2024-2025, the American artist born in 1945 transforms the spaces of the Museo Guggenheim Bilbao into a critical incisive universe on the systems of consumption, authority and influence that shape our lives. No space of the building (vestibule, corridor, staircase, galleries …) where the visitor is plunged into a monumental textual installation covering floors and walls and accompanied by a sound work reduced to a word: “Hello”, “I Love You”, “Sorry” or “Take Care”, repeated by a mechanical voice. The term “immersive”, too often used for exhibitions that are not necessarily, is all its meaning. Words, quotes or slogans challenge the visitor. Wherever his gaze arises, he cannot escape it. Available in fatty typographies of different sizes, and in black, white, red and green color contrasts, these words have an active function.

Vernacular languages

Photomontages, printed texts on vinyl wallpaper, video and/or sound installations, animated LED sculptures: the works here refer to the entire career of the artist. Designed in the 1980s and adapted in their presentation instead, the slogans of the emblematic Untitled (I Shop Therefore I AM), (“I buy so I’m”) and Untitled (Your Body is a batlground) (“Your body is a battlefield”) are associated with images published in the press or found on the net. They still strike as strong while the most recent works, designed from images, advertisements and messages found online, reflect the language of the media and power in the digital age.

“Barbara Kruger’s choices are never neutral; Each sentence becomes a gesture loaded with meaning, registering in a wider comment scheme which extends over decades of practice. And if the formal vocabulary appears coherent, what it reveals is in perpetual change – her work evolves to the rhythm of the language of power, persuasion and protest ”, underlines Lekha Hileman Waitoller, curator at the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao and commissioner of this punchy retrospective thought with the artist. Language and image are a “battlefield” that Kruger continues to question, denounce and whose ideological substrate has been deconstructing for more than five decades.

“Language is a powerful force that defines us. It defines our positions in the world. She expresses worship and contempt. It also includes an element very specific to the site, in the sense that each site, each region, has particular vernacular languages, particular localities in terms of meaning of speech. I am perfectly aware ”, Recalls Barbara Kruger in the exhibition catalog.

The attention she always brings to the history of the country and to the cultural and linguistic context of the place where she is invited to exhibit takes into account, in Bilbao, the history of the Basque Country and Spain. Covering all spaces connecting the different rooms of the exhibition, Untitled (Camino) (“Path”) thus refers to the local context whileUntitled (Truth) takes a new form here, the term in Spanish “Verdad” (“True) appearing in massive letters from black to pale gray. The texts of the monumental installation Untitled (Forever) (“Forever”) designed in situpolitical or literary quotes in Spanish, Basque and English, more expressly challenge the visitor, like this warning by George Orwell from his novel 1984 (1949): “If you want an image of the future, imagine a boot crushing a human face. »»

The last room, devoted to works relating to the language of power, resonates in a even stronger way with the news in its deployment of brutal and violent political discourse. The systematic translation in French of quotes, slogans, videos and explanatory cartels promotes their understanding while the documentary space, located halfway through, invites us to return to the artist’s beginnings and his interventions in public spaces. So many benchmarks given to measure the activism of an artist who has never short -less.