Guggenheim Bilbao
November 2018
November 29, 2018–March 3, 2019
Diana Thater: A Runaway World traveled to the Guggenheim Bilbao from Borusan Contemporary in Istanbul, where it featured five video installations, three of which were recent commissions (September 16, 2017–February 18, 2018). The works As Radical as Reality and A Runaway World came to Istanbul from The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, where they were first shown in 2017 (April 1–June 3). Curated by Manuel Cirauqui, the exhibition in Bilbao presented two works made in 2017: As Radical as Reality and A Runaway World.
The primary emphasis of Thater's work is the tension between the natural environment and mediated reality, and by extension, between tamed and wild, and science and magic. Filmed in Kenya and presented on intersecting screens designed by the artist, As Radical as Reality and A Runaway World explore the lives and habitats of two species that are close to extinction—rhinos and elephants—and the illicit economies that threaten their survival. As Radical as Reality follows Sudan, at the time the world's last living male northern white rhino, and the guards who protected him from poachers in the Ol Pejeta Conservancy. A Runaway World portrays a herd of bull elephants and their habitat in Kenya's Chyulu Hills.
Thater's critically acclaimed retrospective The Sympathetic Imagination was presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015. The exhibition traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2016.