Metahaven: Chaos Theory

Curated by Manuel Cirauqui.

The Film & Video exhibitions program at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is permanently committed to contemporary artistic practices associated with the moving image.

Metahaven’s recent film work, Chaos Theory (2021–2024), is an enthralling 25-minute cinematic poem structured around the relationship between two protagonists: X (Valentina Di Mondo) and Y/Z (Georgina Dávid). X and Y/Z—their names could evoke time series or variables influencing one another—explore the shifting emotional frequencies of parenthood, childhood, and sisterhood. Their interactions, alternating mother tongues, show a constant transfer through their sentient “common core”: a conversation in which Y/Z’s frequent mentions of “falling” seem to articulate the impact of parental responsibility, while X provides a counterpoint by insisting on the power of fancy. As they descend in an elevator ride leading to “the heart of the question,” their progress through allegorical and dreamlike mental states reveals their personalities: Y/Z, pensive, and X, playful. The depiction of X’s actual dream about a flock of black swans emphasizes this dimension, in which every event brings about an unexpected correspondence. Black swans—living emblems of improbability—are the fauna of a fantasy zone in which the causal direction of events has been reversed. As swans swim backwards, raindrops leave transient circles in puddles on their way back to the sky. A solar panel is used by the protagonists now as a tabletop, then as a bed. It is also a gridded space upon which X and Y/Z paste colorful stickers, as if playing a game. At a school gate, Y/Z anticipates X’s coming down the stairs until they meet. “We’re only seconds away; time travel is possible.” Interweaving the lightness of play with existential questions on the nature of attachment, Chaos Theory operates as a non-linear tale. Filmed on location in the outskirts of Amsterdam, the work’s infrastructural landscape actually supports its open-ended poetics and circular tropes.

As Metahaven’s practice characteristically connects art, filmmaking, and design, their newly-conceived spatial installation of Chaos Theory includes a large, irregularly shaped, thickly tufted carpet as a seating area for the audience. 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 gallery’s antichamber, Metahaven’s cinematic piece is paired with a number of textile works that the artists understand as equivalents to film stills—or, as X says, “swans, like stills to films.” This idea is foreshadowed, and amplified, by a selection of textile-based works made in the past four years, featuring an array of complex embroideries on second-hand jumpsuit jackets, plastic bags, and small motifs on patterned bus seat fabrics. The manifold display of these series—Arrows (2020), Blossoms (2021), Swans (2023), Bus Seats (2023) and Murmurations (2024)—is presented alongside the jacquard and video screen triptych Living Together in Stories (2022) and the single jacquard Versions and Waves (2020), where animal transfigurations and graphics slippage persist. 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.