- Dates: June 24–October 24, 2021
- Curator: Manuel Cirauqui
- Film & Video gallery (103)
From June 24 to October 24, 2021, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao will be presenting Cecilia Bengolea. Animations in Water, the second exhibition of 2021 in the Film & Video gallery, a space that the Museum reserves for key works in video art, film, and the artistic languages associated with the moving image.
This time, three recent works by Cecilia Bengolea (b. 1979, Buenos Aires) will be featured. Bengolea is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice merges video, choreography, and sculpture. Following the thread of water and movement flows, this exhibition presents a selection of works where the artist’s reflection on dance, the sensorial interplay between the body’s interiority and its surroundings, as well as the rhythmical relations of social communities and nature, symptomatically manifest through the choreographic language.
Animations in Water gathers three pieces that are representative of the artist’s singular approach to video sculpture—an understanding of moving images as corporeal agencies freely operating in the exhibition space. The ambiguous concept of animation relates both to the life-like motion of cinematic figures and the ancient idea of breathing life into the artificial, vigor into the inert. The anima—as soul, breath, or vital energy of a body—is deeply connected in Bengolea’s work to the conductive capabilities of living organisms, while music appears as the contagious force of animation. In their inexhaustible potential to transform, mutate, and mimic others, animated beings identify with the element of water and its endless plasticity.