Moving Pictures — Bilbao
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain
Exhibition design for the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao edition of Moving Pictures — a separate installation adapted to Frank Gehry's galleries, with dedicated video rooms and lighting solutions for presenting contemporary photography and film in the museum's challenging daylit spaces.
Following the critically successful New York presentation, Moving Pictures traveled to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, on view from October 2003 through May 2004. Asymptote designed an entirely new installation for the Bilbao venue — not a transplant of the New York configuration but a ground-up response to the radically different spatial and environmental conditions of Frank Gehry’s building.
Lighting for Photography
The central design challenge in Bilbao was light. Gehry’s galleries receive abundant natural daylight through skylights and clerestory glazing — conditions that are celebrated for sculpture and painting but problematic for photography and video, where controlled illumination is essential for accurate color rendering and surface legibility. Asymptote’s installation addressed this through a comprehensive lighting strategy that modulated daylight intrusion across the gallery sequence, creating the precisely controlled viewing conditions that photographic and film-based works demand.
Video Rooms
The Bilbao edition expanded on the New York presentation with dedicated video rooms — enclosed screening environments designed to present time-based media with proper acoustic separation and projection quality. Works by artists including Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Steve McQueen, Shirin Neshat, and Pipilotti Rist were given self-contained viewing chambers appropriate to the scale and duration of each piece. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle was screened in a site-specific installation in Gallery 103 and the Museum Auditorium.
The Exhibition
Moving Pictures surveyed over fifty artists working in photography, film, and video from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, drawn from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection. The exhibition proposed that the radical use of reproducible mediums in contemporary art has its roots in the performative and conceptual practices of the 1970s — from Marina Abramovic and Bruce Nauman to the Becher school of German photography, from Cindy Sherman’s constructed identities to the large-scale projections of Shirin Neshat and Steve McQueen.
The Bilbao installation ran for over seven months — one of the longer presentations in the museum’s history — and confirmed Asymptote’s capacity to design exhibition environments that serve the art while engaging the architecture of two of the twentieth century’s most iconic museum buildings.
