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The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country, Artium Museoa, presents the exhibition Josu Bilbao. h [A2 Gallery, until 30 November 2025]. Josu Bilbao’s work is based on the critical and sensory observation of the spaces he occupies as an artist, the result of wavering between physical action and inaction, which is materialised in h through the artist’s intervention in the very architecture of the exhibition gallery. Bilbao’s exhibition also revisits his interest in the experience of language and its non-recordable aspects, such as the gestures and affections it encompasses. Similarly, the sound piece composed specifically for the exhibition by the artist Estanis Comella likewise inhabits the gallery. As is customary, Artium Museoa has published an issue of its #Hitzak series to accompany the exhibition, featuring a contribution by the independent researcher and PhD in Art Isabel de Naverán.
The practice of Josu Bilbao (Bermeo, 1978) is based on observing certain visible and invisible conditions that are perceptible according to when and how, his surrounding environment and the spaces he temporarily occupies as an artist. The answer, always partial, never expressed as definitive, can be to remove rather than to add, to dismantle rather than to build. When tackling a space, its architecture, within its institutionalism, the process of imagining the making and unmaking of the structures that define it leads to a series of attempts that take shape.
The experience of language, a minoritised, phonetic, embodied experience, represents another constant reflection in his work on the fragility and loss of marginalised languages and dialects/ecolects based on oral tradition. Likewise how these are inscribed in the body, in the organs that transform them into sound, in the specificities that are not registered in normative texts but are indeed done so in gestures and feelings. A minor language in the sense that a minority practises it and, in the context in which Josu Bilbao deploys it, it acquires a political dimension.
The title of the exhibition, h, stems partly from a reflection on the historical processes of unifying the Basque language and the words that have emerged to define the parts of the body involved in the production of a sound. This is the case of the aspirated /h/, a specific type of movement and relationship between the oral cavity and the diaphragm. This /h/ also refers to what potentially occurs in the gallery, with the perceptible and imperceptible rhythms that inhabit it. Within these ways of approaching space as a respiratory system that becomes the tongue, the soundtrack composed specifically for h by Estanis Comella (Lleida, 1985) proposes an abstract rhythm with which we can potentially mark the beat for ourselves.
The Museum of Contemporary Art of the Basque Country has published a new issue of its #Hitzak series to accompany the exhibition, featuring a curatorial text by Catalina Lozano, the museum's Chief Curator and head of the exhibition, as well as an essay on the work of Josu Bilbao entitled “Estabas en la cavidad” [You Were in the Cavity], a contribution by Isabel de Naverán (Getxo, 1976), who has a PhD in Art from the UPV and is an independent researcher.
Bilbao won the Gure Artea Award in 2024 in recognition of his creative work. He has exhibited and collaborated with Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao), Halfhouse (Barcelona), etHALL (Barcelona), Carreras Múgica (Bilbao), Centro Párraga (Murcia), Centro Botín (Santander), CentroCentro (Madrid) and the Museo de Bellas Artes (Bilbao).