BILBAO.- The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents Metahaven: Chaos Theory, the year's first exhibition of Film & Video exhibition series. This program, celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2024, is permanently devoted to artistic practices associated with the moving image.
Chaos Theory is a unique film installation by Metahaven, the renowned collective founded by Amsterdam-based artists Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden in 2007. Encompassing a variety of mediums including moving images, graphics, interfaces, textile works, and theory, Metahaven is regarded as a forerunner of interdisciplinary practice today.
In Chaos Theory, Metahaven addresses the range of shifting emotions of childhood, sisterhood and parenthood in the connected existence of the film's two protagonists. The enthralling 25-minute film takes revolves around different moments in the dialogue of a child ‘X’ (Valentina Di Mondo) and an adult named ‘Y/Z’ (Georgina Dávid), as they play, walk and live together in a multi-lingual reality. Filled with poetic resonances and ingenious wordplay, their exchanges are set in open spaces as well as more intimate settings—an elevator, a room—all of them equally allegorical and dream-like. A sense of continuity between wakefulness and reverie, pervades the entire film, where the lightness of play alternates with conversations on existential time and gravity. Thus, Chaos Theory operates as a nonlinear tale that challenges distinctions between voices and thoughts, places and fantasy zones.
Shot on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the film’s infrastructural landscape appears in contrast with its open-ended poetics. Multiple vantage points, or screens within the screen, coexist at times.
Sections of the screen are outlined in red, as in a video conference call, when a new motif appears in the story. Chaos Theory is presented in a newly conceived spatial installation that includes a large woolen carpet, conceived as a seating area for the audience. Graphic vectors and colour squares mingle in a densely tufted texture that is reminiscent of common upholstery in public transportation. This object somehow materializes X’s words: “I see us in things that are not us; in the drawings of the seats on the bus.”
In the anteroom, Metahaven’s film resonates with a multiplicity of textile works that the artists understand as equivalent to film stills. Thus, the presentation of Chaos Theory is expanded with a selection of embroidered objects created in the past four years, some of which are being exhibited publicly for the first time. These series—Arrows (2020), Blossoms (2021), Bus Seats (2023), and Murmurations (2024)— include jumpsuit jackets, plastic bags, and small tapestries on bus seat fabric. Beside them are the triptych Living Together in Stories (2022) and the single jacquard Versions and Waves (2020). Juxtaposing oneiric landscapes, interfaces, bird flocks and geographics, the artists invite us to challenge our certainties and envision a future defined by empathy, fluid identity, and acknowledged dependence.
Amsterdam-based Vinca Kruk (b. 1980) and Daniel van der Velde (b. 1971) founded the Metahaven collective in 2007. Their work encompasses filmmaking, writing, and design, and has presented solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, New York; ICA London; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; Asakusa, Tokyo; Izolyatsia Kyiv; e-flux, New York; Tick Tack, Antwerp; and State of Concept, Athens, among others; as well as participated in major group exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw; the Gwangju Biennale; the Sharjah Biennial; the Busan Biennale; Ghost:2561, Bangkok; and many others. Their work is featured in collections of the Sharjah Art Foundation, the National Gallery of Victoria, M HKA, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, among others.
Metahaven are artistic advisors at Rijksakademie, Amsterdam; affiliate researchers at Antikythera, Los Angeles; and heads of department at the Geo-Design MA at Design Academy Eindhoven.
