BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is presenting Vito Acconci/Sergio Prego: YOU from April 3 to September 7, 2025. This unique exhibition, part of the Film & Video Gallery programming, brings together two artists from different generations and backgrounds whose artistic careers were interlinked in New York between 1996 and 2002, and whose practices show deep affinities.

The exhibition which starts this year’s Film & Video programming originated in the collaboration and friendship which Vito Acconci (New York, 1940–2017) and the Basque Artist Sergio Prego (Donostia-San Sebastián, 1969) shared between 1996 and 2002, a key period in the activity of Acconci Studio, a speculative design and architecture studio. The shows trace a subjective route through Acconci’s works in video and performance through a set designed by Prego, whose unique approach to sculpture resonates profoundly with the US artist. It also presents a selection of Prego’s videos in clear dialogue with the historical output of both Vito Acconci and Acconci Studio. Acconci and Prego share specific attention to the aesthetic phenomena that emerge from the interaction of the body and the senses with audiovisual media and architecture, as if the corporeal tried to fit into the rules and structures of the physical medium captured by the camera. To both of them, artworks serve as specific expressions of these tensions and paradoxes, whose impact directly affects the visitor’s physical awareness.

The exhibition is divided into two spaces. The first presents several single-channel videos by Prego shown simultaneously, while the soundtrack by Acconci (Running Tape, 1969), plays in a corner of the gallery. This sound piece is a recording of a performance by Acconci in New York’s Central Park in which he runs, counts every step, and records his voice, then stops to catch his breath and starts running again. This performance reveals the artist’s interest in carrying everyday actions to the extreme and highlighting the aesthetic or poetic value of the mundane.

Sergio Prego’s four videos are shown on a row of analog monitors placed in tension along the wall. In these works, we see the artist or his guests levitating or engaging in different actions in space with impossible bodily movements and positions. Prego assembles still images as if they were 3D animations with simple editing tricks to get spectators to see a world where the laws of physics seem altered and perspectives multiply. The theme of suspended time and manipulated space is a constant feature of Prego’s work. In Cowboy Inertia Creeps, 2003 and Flicker, 2007, Prego uses multiple cameras to create each shot and produce a moment of action that appears three-dimensional. The hypnotic nature of each sequence resignifies the architectures of the contemporary city, which is densely built yet impersonal. In the work Sunoise, he records a sculptural installation from 2005: two bright fluorescent tubes connected by mechanical arms fold and revolve like a self-absorbed automaton in a gallery, while in Bisector (Bisectriz, 2008), the artist’s body once again appears in tension within an empty apartment. Positioned at forty-five degrees over his head, his body makes a bisector line that divides the right angle of the wall with the floor.

The central part of the exhibition is occupied by two large inflatable structures created by Sergio Prego that serve as projection screens on which three historical Vito Acconci videos alternate. They are recorded performances in which the artist uses the camera as a means to provoke more than to portray himself. In Centers (1971), Acconci appears pointing directly with his finger at the camera and at his own reflection in a video monitor offscreen. He is staring and striving to keep his finger in the center of the shot but wavering as he wears out. The artist explains it this way: “The result (the TV image) turns the activity around: a pointing away from myself, at an outside viewer—I end up widening my focus onto passing viewers (I’m looking straight out by looking straight in).” Turn-On (1974) is a challenging confrontation between the artist and spectator. The back of Acconci’s neck is shown up close while we hear him hum to himself, at first lyrically and then aggressively. Suddenly, he turns around, his face fills the screen, and he squints at the spectator while talking breathlessly. He repeats this cycle again and again, increasingly violently until he turns around and says, “It’s me. I have no conviction anymore. I can’t find any reason to do art. I’m waiting for you … not to be there.” The third piece, Three Adaptation Studies (1970), is an experimental film in which Acconci physically withstands three simple but uncomfortable actions: first, with his eyes covered with scarf, he tries to dodge balls being thrown at him; in the second action, he tries to keep his eyes open while his face is lathered with soap; and finally, he struggles to put his entire fist in his mouth.

Acconci seems to call desperately attention in these works, as if he prophetically anticipated the camera in the social media today. More than five decades after they were created, his video works finger the spectator and prompt unease in them.

Vito Acconci (Bronx, New York, 1940) lived and worked in Brooklyn until he passed away in 2017. His work evolved throughout his career from experimental writing to conceptual art, body work, performance, video, multimedia installation, and speculative architecture.

His work has earned international acclaim in many exhibitions, including individual shows and major retrospectives at institutions like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne; the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona in Barcelona (MACBA); the Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla, California; and MoMA PS1. His work has also been shown in group exhibitions, the Venice Biennale, Documenta in Kassel, and several Whitney Biennials. Acconci has written fiction, poetry, essays for catalogues, and art publications. His architectural projects include the United Bamboo Store in Tokyo, the Schacter Gallery in New York, and the artificial island of Mur in Graz, Austria. His accolades include grants from the American Academy in Rome, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst of Berlin, and Guggenheim Foundation grants.

Sergio Prego (Donostia-San Sebastian, 1969) has lived and worked in New York for over two decades. Trained in the artistic circles of Arteleku in the first half of the 1990’s, Prego spent six years working in Vito Acconci’s studio, from 1996 to 2002, where he was the only artist among a group of engineers and architects. Throughout his career, Prego has explored the sculptural qualities of performance and vice versa using disciplines like video, spatial interventions, sculptures, and pneumatic architecture works. He and Itziar Okariz represented Spain at the 2019 Venice Biennale, and he participated in creating and developing the innovative PROFORMA project at MUSAC in 2010 and in the Kalostra art pedagogy project in Donostia-San Sebastián in 2015. In recent years, his works have been exhibited in prominent institutions like the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, 2017; the Venice Biennale, 2019; the Graham Foundation, Chicago, 2020; and the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, 2022–2024, which earned Prego the Bosh Aymerich Foundation Sculpture Award in its inaugural edition.