Antoni Muntadas. "Other fears".

  OCTOBER 15, 2025 - MARCH 1, 2026

Curator: Bartomeu Marí
Space: Room 0

"Other Fears" is the title of the exhibition that the Museum of the University of Navarra dedicates to Antoni Muntadas, one of the most relevant contemporary artists of his generation, who has articulated his work as an expression of the critical spirit, the media landscape and the intersection of art with various disciplines and methodologies.

The exhibition is organized around a new work, presented to the public for the first time, produced by the Museum as part of its Tender Puentes artistic residency program. Entitled "Between Fears" (2022-2025), it is part of a project, a series of works initiated by the artist since 2005, that analyzes the ways in which Western societies have positioned fear as one of the main political arguments since the beginning of the 21st century.

This proposal studies fear as an integral, albeit invisible and intangible, part of the running of the bulls during the Sanfermines. Presented as a video installation that envelops the viewer "between the ground and the sky", the work provides an unusual and unexpected image of the fiesta and the collective rites that are part of it. Iconographically abstract, the installation gives a leading role to sound and also offers an alternative vision to the clichés that dominate the image of the city and its most emblematic festival. "Other Fears" is a singular work in the artist's production. It depicts fear in a dramatic structure starring sound and with an iconography that tangentially portrays the city. In a way, the work recovers the urban experiences that were lived during the period of confinement as a consequence of the Covid -19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when the production of the work began.

The exhibition also includes a selection of existing works that, within the same line of interest, provides a context for the reception and understanding of this new work, declining other expressions of the fears that, in various parts of the world, confirm this global psychological, social and political paradigm shift. In 2005 and 2007, Muntadas produced two video works that are "television intervention" projects about two specific places in the world, two broad borders of great symbolism in which the "fear of the other" staged by the rejection of immigration and racism. "On Translation: Fear/Miedo" (2005) and "On Translation: Miedo/Jauf" (2007) bring together interviews with people who live the tensions in these areas on a daily basis, with images from television archives that refer to the term fear on the border between Mexico and the United States on the one hand and the Strait of Gibraltar, which separates Spain and Morocco, Europe and Africa on the other, as well as notes and contributions by the artist. These videos seek to convey how fear is an emotion "translated" on both sides of the borders from very different perspectives. "On Translation: Fear/Miedo" was created to be broadcast between August and November 2005 from locations that somehow connect the centers of power and decision making with the sites where these politics manifest themselves on a daily basis: Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City and Washington DC. "On Translation: Fear/Jauf" is not a work about emigration/immigration from Africa to Europe, nor about religion or terrorism. It addresses the construction of the South as fiction and reality connected to phenomena of the unknown, the exotic and the different or the attempt to understand and perceive hope in a continent "forgotten" by the Western world, Africa, as a promise for the future.

On the other hand, "Alphaville e Outros ..." (2011) is a video that was part of the installation of the same title and was based in Alphaville, a "walled" residential neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil. Narratively very different from the previous ones, the work examines the phenomenon of "gated communities" and how fear and the search for exclusivity lead to urban isolation and exclusion. This work takes its cue from Jean-Luc Godard's 1965 film Alphaville , which offers a dystopian, science fiction vision of a totalitarian urban future. Scenes from Godard's black and white film are juxtaposed with images of almost utopian promotions of the Brazilian "Alphaville". Muntadas presents an architecture and an organization of space based on rhetoric and the mechanisms of fear and control.

"The construction of fear" (2008 - 2025) is a work that refers to the place and time in which the work takes place. A selection of headlines from the press (local and national) in the months preceding the opening of the exhibition where the words "fear" and similar words appear, such as "panic" or "terror", is reconstructed as a mural using the same typographies in which they appeared in print. This work represents a map of local fears where the exhibition takes place in that same year... and has been exhibited in places such as Alicante, Amman (Jordan), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Caracas (Venezuela) and Paris (France), among others. 

The exhibition is completed with the edition "Fear, Panic, Terror" (2011), composed of five framed panels that each include six covers of books published in the USA, whose titles include the concepts of "fear", "panic" and "terror". The work reflects how the publishing industry has commercially exploited the different types of fears felt by English-speaking societies, while exponentially increasing the sense of collective fear and its various expressions and consequences.

RELATED ACTIVITIES

Masterclass Antoni Muntadas. "Other fears" / OCTOBER 15 / 19:00