Exhibitions
2025-06-24 • 2025-09-30
Las flamencas / Los flamencos. Pedro G. Romero
Multiverse programme. Videoart and digital creation
Room 6 - 10
Since 2018, the museum and the BBVA Foundation have been partnering in the call for applications for the MULTIVERSO Grants for Video Art Creation, which promote audiovisual artistic production Spain and its dissemination through different public programmes.
As part of this joint project to support contemporary art, the museum is hosting the presentation of several of the works resulting from the grants awarded in the 2018 edition, most of them premieres. The exhibition programme includes works by Antoni Abad, Toni Serra (Abu Ali), Mabel Palacín, Nadia Hotait, Manu Arregui and Pedro G. Romero, artists from different generations with a variety of orientations who use the moving image as a tool for creation and inquiry, thus offering an examination to video today.
Pedro G. Romero. Las flamencas / Los flamencos
Intermittent rehearsal, 2019–2021
Stroll through nine video channels
49 min. (nine sequences of 5 min. 9 sec.)
Rooms 6-10 / From 24 June to 30 September 2025
Pedro G. Romero, National Fine Arts Award winner in 2024, is premiering the installation Las flamencas / Los flamencos in Bilbao. It was produced thanks to a Fundación BBVA-Bilbao Fine Arts Museum Multiverse Video Art Creation Grant (2018).
The video creation is comprised of nine strolls featuring nine personalities associated with the world of flamenco, with the city of Seville as the backdrop. All nine walk through different spaces in a psychological-geographic, visual and sound exploration that talks about flamenco as a particular way of life. As a kind of video-essay, these portraits unfold simultaneously before the spectator as they walk among them near sounds and images, almost as if they were on the street.
The different material circumstances generating this piece are associated with the production of the film Nueve Sevillas [Nine Sevilles], which was shot in 2018 under the direction of Gonzalo García Pelayo (Madrid, 1947). This flamenco film about Seville and the many ways the city imagines itself sprang from a series of strolls or meanders that Pedro G. Romero took around the city with the same nine personalities portrayed in these videos.
The project’s earlier titles, Las sabias [The Wise Women] and Las sabiondas y los sabiondos [The Know-It-All Women and Men], spoke about how the characters know the city just by breathing. But all this knowledge was absorbed by the film Nueve Sevillas. And yet, there was something essential, basic, sensorial and mute—if you will—that was not in that film..
Somehow the psycho-geographic essence of the project was lost in favour of other narrative, musical, poetic and political elements. The fact is that there is an intermittent, insincere stroll underlying the film: the experience of walking around Seville infinite times, the many Sevilles that there are in Seville. And that drifting, its immediate expression, is the crux, the direction where Las flamencas / Los flamencos is pointing. After all, the experience of flamenco is also an experience of Seville—among other things, the city where Pedro G. Romero’s studio is located.
Las flamencas / Los flamencos essentially examines the nine mute strolls that the characters in Nueve Sevillas took around the city. The intermittency of the images reflects that idea of the ‘deafening silence’ of everything heard around the images. There are nine walks, one by each person in the story, lasting 49 minutes, divided into identical sequences of 5 minutes 9 seconds each, in which the interaction of the sound changes with different images, different walks, different videos. It is a route whose sound marks the other features of each stroll.
The piece unfolds on nine monitors placed in a row, like an amphitheatre or a labyrinth—as it may be—and the spectator has to go through the exhibition visiting, listening to and seeing each monitor, thanks to the combination of monitors and sounds. Seeing the entire piece thus means walking through them. Making the walk necessary for the spectators to see the entire piece is crucial as they draw closer to and further from each of the monitors. Las flamencas / Los flamencos is also a walking piece, as well as the distillation, essence and power of Nueve Sevillas. It offers an experience of walking from one projection to another. Showing it necessarily contains the museum space as a place for a kind of wandering. Attention will always be intermittent.
The 49 minutes are filled with all types of sensorial details that go beyond just the images themselves. The birds singing in the museum square, Javiera de la Fuente intoning Violeta Parra’s Qué he ganado con quererte, the sounds of Errico Petrella’s Ione performed by a processional band, the song Pájaro negro/Auschwitz’s song/Samudaripen sung by Janek and the deafening clapping of Bobote, Marco de Ana, Diaa Homsy, Sonia Poveda and Lole de los Reyes, which make the credits tremble… these are just some of the encounters scattered through the walk through the museum. While Charles Baudelaire coined the word flâneur, in Cádiz the cantaor Enrique el Mellizo was famous for his strolls—some said philosophical, some said poetic—whose unique feature was silence: El Mellizo always walked in silence.
Thus, while we like to distinguish between walks, meanders or hikes, the public is essentially invited to spend sometime here in the streets of Seville walking whatever way they want.
Featuring: Yinka Esi Graves, Juan Jiménez ‘Bobote’, Gonzalo García Pelayo, Javiera de la Fuente, Vanesa Montoya, David Pielfort, Rocío Montero, Rudolf Rostas ‘Janek’ and Pastora Filigrana
Special collaboration: Amparo Bengala, José Luis Ortiz Nuevo and Javier García Pelayo
Locations (Seville): San Vicente neighbourhood, Polígono Sur/Las Tres Mil Viviendas, Isabel II Bridge, Calle Feria/Plaza del Pumarejo, Calle Betis, near Santa Justa Station, El Vacie, Barriada Villegas and El Jueves market
Edition and direction (audio and image): Sergi Dies
Image team: Joaquín Aneri, Juan Manuel Carmona Batán, Alfonso Jiménez and Javier López
Sound: Mario Alberto Torres Fernández
Assistant director: Olivia Cábez
Production: Máquina P.H. and the Plataforma Independiente de Estudios Flamencos Modernos y Contemporáneos [pie.fmc] with BNV Producciones in the filming of Nueve Sevillas
Pedro G. Romero (Aracena, Huelva, 1964)
An artist, researcher, curator, editor and film director, Pedro G. Romero has been working as an artist since 1987. His projects reflect on the ideological use of images and their activation in different social contexts. They incorporate issues from the analysis of historical events, flamenco, popular culture and the genealogies of bohemian, the artistic avant-garde and the counterculture. His work also expresses his interest in poetic and linguistic experimentation, and he works both on the periphery and in the centre of institutions, merging his interest in the high-brow and low-brow culture.
Since the late 1990s, he has worked on the projects Archivo F.X. on images and iconoclasm, and Máquina P.H. on flamenco and popular culture, one of whose activities is the Plataforma Independiente de Estudios Flamencos Modernos y Contemporáneos [Independent Platform of Modern and Contemporary Flamenco Studies] (pie.fmc), which views flamenco from a multidisciplinary perspective that includes aesthetics, anthropology, art history and sociology.
His works are found in important collections like those of the MNCARS, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville) and the Fundación la Caixa.
Recently, he held the show Máquinas de Trovar, a sweeping retrospective which he dedicated to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid) in 2021, along with A de archipiélago at Es Baluard (Palma de Mallorca, 2023) and D de deuda at the Museo Zumalakarregi (Ormaiztegi, Gipuzkoa, 2024).
He has participated in important international art events like the São Paulo Biennial (2014), Documenta in Kassel (2017), the Bergen Assembly in Norway (2019) and the Sydney and Coimbra biennials (2023).
The major shows he has curated include Tratado de Paz as part of the activities in San Sebastián when it was the European Capital of Culture (2016), Máquinas de Vivir at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge in Barcelona (2017), Aplicación Murillo at the Espacio Santa Clara in Seville (2018) and Popular at IVAM (2023).
He also developed the graphic concept for the twentieth edition of the Flamenco Biennial in Seville (2018) and has partnered with the dancer Israel Galván and other artists like Rocío Márquez, Niño de Elche, Tomás de Perrate and Rosalía.
In 2024, Pedro G. Romero won the National Fine Arts Award, whose jury stressed ‘a solid career whose artistic, intellectual and material work encompasses multiple fields of meaning and seemingly opposing formats (sculpture, film, archival productions, performances, etc.), integrating curatorial and research practices into his artistic undertakings’.
Manu Arregui. Harmonies of Senescence / 2020
Three-channel video projection
Sound, 24 min 3 s
Room 4 / 21 November 2023 to 7 January 2024
Manu Arregui’s Harmonies of Senescence (2020), is a sophisticated exercise in misrepresentation of the chorus lines from Hollywood musicals from the 1930s to 1950s. Based on apparently innocuous notions—the ideal of white, athletic youth; the discipline of synchronised choreographies; joy and glamour as watchwords—musical cinema became an exercise in evasion and propaganda for the hetero-patriarchal view of women’s role in an industry driven by male desire. Drawing from the resources of avant-garde cinema, music and dance, Arregui summons a group of veteran women dancers, sometimes nude, who use syncopated rhythms to challenge the strict moral codes established in those decades, which resonate once again today in the prohibitions being imposed in the major digital platforms.
In 2022, Arregui’s video Choreography for 5 Transvestites (2001) became part of the Basque public art collection through the Shared Collection programme promoted by the Basque government.
The starting point of Harmonies of Senescence was using misrepresentation, a parody that would reveal the hetero-patriarchal conception and political contents of the visual codes in the history of film and audiovisual propaganda. It is a remaking to mock and yet celebrate campy aesthetic values with an egalitarian gaze. The main characters in the project are not figures expecting a subject to appropriate them; their bodies do not operate in imposed objectification. Instead, they are women who interact with each other, who look at each other and also train their eyes on the audience, questioning male desire, the fundamental engine driving that industry. The models analysed include Strike Up the Band (called Armonías de juventud or Harmonies of Youth in Spanish, Busby Berkeley, 1940), which has served as the inspiration for the project’s title.
The piece is a multi-channel installation on three screens, which include the spectators’ bodies as yet another element, forcing them to travel through the interstices of a non-linear storyline. We go through the rooms and sets, participating in the recording and all its ins and outs. The stages, hallways and stairs seem to offer us different ways to travel between reality and the afterlife.
Manu Arregui (Santander, 1970)
Manu Arregui lives and works in Bilbao. He has a bachelor’s in Fine Arts from the University of the Basque Country and has been a pioneer in the use of 3D animation in major video creation and sculpture projects, which seek to reflect on body politics and non-normative identities, as well as their representation through gestural codes and social archetypes.
Unseasonal Autumn / 2020-2023
Videoinstallation
Sound, 10 min 44 s
Room 4 / 21 November 2023 – 7 January 2024
Through two stories, Hotait addresses questions regarding the meaning of human existence from a twofold perspective: that of the philosopher, jurist and great Roman orator Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) and that of a group of scientists researching the origin of the world—of matter, space and time—in the nuclear laboratory in Frascati.
To do so, Hotait and her team travelled to this town, located around 20 km from Rome and the headquarters of the National Nuclear Physics Institute of Italy. Near it, the archaeology park of the former city of Tusculum contains the memory of Cicero’s pleasure villa where the philosopher had to go into exile after Julius Caesar rose to power. His adamant defence of the values of the Roman Republic ended up costing him his life.
Unseasonal Autumn connects Cicero’s life just before his death—inspired by one of the ‘historical miniatures’ recounted by Stefan Zweig in his essay ‘Decisive Moments in History’ (1927)—with the scientific community’s quest for the very key to existence by studying what is called the ‘God particle’, the Higgs boson.
In the video installation, the script starts at the location of Tusculum/Frascati, where simultaneous stories that address the existential question unfold. ‘I think that the worst tragedy is not existing after having existed’, declares one of the characters at a key point in Hotait’s work.
The installation was filmed in Italy with a wholly Italian cast. Unseasonal Autumn was envisioned as a cinematographic triptych set in three different times in which choreographed actions and dialogued parts succeed one another. They begin in the fictitious retreat in Tusculum, go through the stunning reality of the particle accelerator laboratory in Frascati and end with the staging of a dramatic dialogue in the archaeological ruins of the ancient Roman theatre.
According to the artist, ‘The video installation encourages us to engage in dialogue with a key juncture in our history and with a culture whose heirs we are’. In the age of post-truth and resurgence of the far-right, Nadia Hotait directs the humanist gaze towards a figure and a historical episode in Europe two thousand years ago whose traces and legacy still survive today.
Nadia Hotait
Studied Audiovisual Communication at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Waseda University (Tokyo), and graduated from the Low-Res MFA program at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works use video, film collages and photography to depict episodes of history, emphasizing and prioritizing the experience of individuals over the overall historical narrative.
El trayecto and The Track / 2019
Video projection
From th 18th of July to de 17th of September 2023
El trayecto and The Track are part of a series of works in which Mabel Palacín analyses the transformations that the explosion of technology has prompted in our lifestyle, in this case by exploring the possibilities afforded by the complex audiovisual technology used by a real driverless vehicle prototype in the creation of film-based stories. Even though storytelling has been a feature of the human gaze until now, the artist reflects on the role played by the constant creation of automated images in shaping our everyday visual environment and our imagination. ‘The camera is a machine that changes the way we see the world and the way we live, like the car. Cameras and cars are two essential technologies in our recent culture, and their combination in driverless cars opens up infinite possibilities regarding the fictions we live with.’
The vehicle used to record the videos was equipped with nine 4k cameras arranged in such a way that they created two wraparound rings at different heights without any blind spots. Plus, a thermal camera was used to provide another type of data. Viewing all the recorded material led Palacín to formalise this work into two different pieces: El trayecto includes the images from the black-and-white camera and images from the colour graphic reading, while in The Track, the images were eliminated and only the graphic was kept.
Mabel Palacín (Barcelona, 1965)
Mabel Palacín holds a bachelor’s in Art History and another in Cinema, Photography and Video, both from the University of Barcelona. She currently lives and works in Barcelona and Milan. Her artistic practice has been based on intense inquiry into the image, which has taken shape in photographs, videos and installations. Her work seeks to study the image via the image itself, challenging the division between art and criticism. She has been a pioneer in her exploration of the way images shape the contemporary world and her consideration of the problems that condition our understanding of today’s visual landscape. Therefore, her creations have major theoretical implications that go beyond the innocent use of the media, in a constant interrogation of the consequences for the spectator.
Asemanastán. The Land of the Skies (La tierra de los cielos) / 2020
Video installation
From 16th of May to 9 of July 2023
Shortly after he started working on this video, Toni Serra (Abu Ali) died in November 2019, leaving the project he submitted to the Multiverse grant unfinished.
The work was completed by a team of professionals who were friends of the artist based on his preliminary script, using materials that he himself had recorded on his journey to Iran. Alex Muñoz, a visual artist and photographer, took charge of choosing the sequences and editing the images, and Barbara Held, a composer of the music in several of the artist’s pieces, oversaw the video’s sound based on the material that Serra had recorded. Given the impossibility of making the same video he would have made, the goal was not to make a linear montage and instead the main piece was envisioned in sets of sequences in a diptych format, so that they appear alternatively on each screen and later melt into blackness. In the antechamber, a screen shows a man reciting a poem in Farsi, while another shows the image of light reflecting on the water, the video’s emblem.
Just as in his last pieces, this Toni Serra work examines the relationship between video and inner experience and visions that traverse that intermediate world—between worlds—between the real and unreal, the visible and invisible, sleep and wakefulness, life and death… as a journey that not only crosses these limits and frontiers but also erases them.
Just as in his last pieces, this Toni Serra work examines the relationship between video and inner experience and visions that traverse that intermediate world—between worlds—between the real and unreal, the visible and invisible, sleep and wakefulness, life and death… as a journey that not only crosses these limits and frontiers but also erases them.
Toni Serra (Abu Ali) (Manresa, 1960 - Barcelona, 2019)
Toni Serra earned a bachelor’s in Art History from the University of Barcelona and was trained in video art at CUNY Brooklyn and other schools in New York. For two decades, he used his work to reflect and experiment on the relationship between video and inner experience. Morocco, Tangier and the Atlas Mountains were just some of his usual landscapes. His most prominent creations include Midnight Sun (2016), 7 Contemplations (2016), Life in Harmony (2018) and The Way of Bees (2018). He was a founding member of the OVNI Archives (Observatorio de Video No Identificado, or ‘Unidentified Video Observatory’), where he served as a researcher and creator (1994–2019). He won awards such as the Nam June Paik (2006) and the Ibn Arabi al Barzakh Award of the Muyyiddin Ibn Arabi Society. In 2002, upon the birth of his first child, he began to sign his works as Abu Ali, or ‘father of Ali’.
Oídos sordos (Deaf ears) / 2019
Video installation
From 6 March to 7 May 2023
Fourteen deaf people speak with each other in sign language about various topics of their own choosing: jobs, associationalism, art, utopia, humour, autonomy, communication, depression, sex, urban and rural areas, love, inclusion, happiness and sadness, truth and lies, anarchy and dictatorship and deaf culture. Infiltrated in the hegemonic hearing crowds, they generously share their gestural-spatial eloquence to build a choral story about their expectations and opinions. The project—made in conjunction with the Catalan Confederation of Deaf Persons—addresses social inclusion, and in contrast to the dominant verbal communication, it gives the word to the community of people with auditory diversity. Oídos sordos reveals the extraordinary vigour of deaf culture.
The video installation includes 16 videos and audios distributed in three large-sized projections. The videos are subtitled (Spanish), and the audios reproduce the sounds emitted by the people speaking in sign language in the recordings. At the entrance to the gallery are transcriptions of these conversations in Braille (for blind persons) and macro-characters (for people with vision difficulties). To Abad, all these materials form an ‘intense amalgam of codes of expression, to shape an environment where the participants’ dialogues can reach that yearned-for place called eloquence’.
Antoni Abad (Lleida, 1956)
With a Bachelor’s in Art History from the University of Barcelona and a European Media Master’s from Pompeu Fabra University, Antoni Abad started his career in media like sculpture and sequential photographs, which he worked on in the 1980s and early 1990s. Since 1994, he has focused on expanded video and the Internet, which serve as the raw materials for his current practice with different groups at risk of exclusion. Between 2004 and 2014, he made several Internet-based audiovisual communication projects whose point of departure was the use of mobile phones by vulnerable groups in Mexico City, Lleida, León, Madrid, Barcelona, Costa Rica, Geneva and New York. The project made in Barcelona in conjunction with persons with reduced mobility earned him the 2006 Golden Nica Digital Communities award from the Festival Prix Ars Electronica in Linz (Austria).
Abad’s projects have been displayed in numerous venues and settings, including at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; the Centro de Arte Santa Mónica and the Fundación Suñol in Barcelona; New Museum and P.S.1. in New York; Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin and ZKM in Karlsruhe, both in Germany; MUSAC in León; Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva; Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires; and Laboratorio de Arte Alameda and Centro Cultural de España in Mexico. His work as also been part of the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2017), the Ibero-American Biennial of Lima (1999), Seville (2004 and 2008), Mercosul Porto Alegre (Brazil, 2009), the Photobiennial of the São Paulo Art Museum and the Biennial of Art of Curitiba (Brazil, 2013) and the Berlin Biennial (2016).