Installation for Bilbao

Jenny Holzer uses language as her primary medium. Her strategy of placing surprising texts where normal signage is expected gives her direct access to a large public that might not give "art" any consideration while allowing her to undermine forms of power and control that often go unnoticed. Conceived as a permanent, site-specific work for one of the galleries of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao that she chose, Installation for Bilbao comprises a row of nine vertical, double-sided L.E.D. signboards, each more than 12 meters tall. Transmitted in Basque (in blue at the back), Spanish, and English (in red at the front), the texts are a variation of Arno, a body of writing originally composed for a project benefiting AIDS research, and they negotiate the tenuous and fraught border between private and public realms.