From 9 October 2026 to 21 February 2027, the museum presents 66–76–26, an installation conceived for it: the a cappella versions of Wild is the Wind by Nina Simone (1966) and David Bowie (1976), in the dark.
The arrangement rests on few elements, and that is what makes it legible. According to the Guggenheim Bilbao, Steve McQueen sets two recordings of Wild is the Wind, the theme by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington, in dialogue: Nina Simone’s interpretation in 1966 and David Bowie’s in 1976. Both are a cappella, stripped of any instrumentation, and resonate in a room plunged into total darkness. The museum specifies that the work is entirely new and specially conceived for Bilbao.
The principle lies in the visitor’s movement. According to the press kit, the two voices begin a dialogue through the architecture as one moves through the space. Each person will presumably hear it differently depending on where they stand, and the ten years separating the two recordings become a distance that the body travels. The museum presents the song as a love song, an elegy and a cry of nostalgia; it has accompanied McQueen for more than thirty years, and the power of the emotions it contains fascinates him.
The choice of a cappella is the clearest gesture: by removing the instruments, the installation leaves only two timbres, two ways of holding a phrase, and the room without light removes any competing image. What this will actually produce depends on parameters the press kit does not give, such as the number and arrangement of the sound sources, the length of the loop or the size of the room. Without having heard them, one cannot judge whether the announced dialogue holds in the space or remains a principle.
The exhibition is organised by curator Lekha Hileman, with the support of the insurance company Occident, one of whose executives appears in the official photograph alongside the artist and the museum’s director general, Miren Arzalluz. This support is a fact of production, with no known bearing on the subject matter. What to retain at the opening: a work that bets on listening alone, and whose success will be decided in the museum’s architecture more than in the recordings, already well known.
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