Vito Acconci / Sergio Prego: YOU
04.03.2025 - 09.07.2025
The Film & Video exhibitions program at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is permanently committed to contemporary artistic practices associated with the moving image.
The point of departure for this exhibition is the collaboration and friendship that united Vito Acconci (b. 1940, New York; d. 2017) with Basque artist Sergio Prego (b. 1969, Donostia/ San Sebastián), whose artistic paths mingled in a key period of activities of the speculative design and architecture firm Acconci Studio. This exhibition proposes a subjective journey through Acconciʼs practice in video and performance using a display system designed by Prego, whose distinctive approach to sculpture deeply resonates with Acconci’s understanding of constructed spaces and the forces driving bodies in them. Their work share a specific attention to aesthetic phenomena emerging from the interplay of the senses with media and architecture, as though corporeality constantly tried to cope with shapes and norms before the lens. For both artists, artworks can operate as distinct manifestations of such tensions and paradoxes, whose impact directly affects the visitor’s physical self-awareness.
In the first part of the show, several videos by Prego play simultaneously while Acconci’s sound work Running Tape (1969) resonates in a corner of the gallery. The latter’s exercise —repeatedly counting while he ran until losing his breath, over and over—affects time, while Prego uses simple image editing hacks to present impossible positions and movements in space. Acconci’s voice can also be heard on the other side of the room, this time as the narrator of a documentary reflecting on his radical design practice. In the main space, visitors discover two large inflatable structures by Prego that operate as projection screens for select historical videos by Acconci. In his recorded performances, Acconci used the camera less as a means for self-portraiture than as a vehicle for provocation. We witness him directly pointing his finger or intimately whispering in Centers (1971) and Turn On (1974); and aggressively testing his body in Three Adaptation Studies (1970). In these works, Acconci desperately calls for attention as though he had presciently anticipated future uses of the camera in social media. More than five decades after their making, we cannot help feeling pointed at, often uncomfortably, by Acconci’s video works.
Gallery: 103
Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
Vito Acconci
Three Adaptation Studies, 1970
Film Super 8mm transferido a video (fotograma)
Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix, New York