On Friday 20 November, at 7.00 pm, the URIBITARTE40 Gallery at BilbaoArte will open the exhibition ‘Personal Records. Revisiting the Past: Practices of Recording and Rewriting”,
As part of the opening programme, that same Friday, 20 November, at 6.00 pm, the exhibition’s curators, Ainara Martin, an artist and cultural manager, and Jon Begiristain Mitxelena, an architect, will lead a guided tour.
The exhibition will be open Tuesday to Saturday from 11.00 am to 2.00 pm and from 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm, and on Sundays and public holidays from 11.00 am to 2.00 pm until 31 January 2027.
Free admission.
Aztarnak / Personal Records emerges from an encounter between two distinct professional practices – those of Ainara Martin, artist and cultural manager, and Jon Begiristain Mitxelena, architect – which find common ground in the act of recording. Their careers are rooted in different disciplines, but they share an understanding of the project as an open-ended process: a space to explore, build connections, activate contexts and create new possibilities.
The exhibition invites us to view the BilbaoArte Collection from this perspective, not as a closed set of works, but as a living archive of processes, research and moments of work. A collection that preserves not only outcomes, but also traces of what happened as an artistic practice took shape.
Recording does not simply mean documenting or preserving what has already happened. It also means keeping available the possibilities that remained open: an idea that never developed, an experiment, a fragment, a project put on hold, an abandoned language or an intuition that can take on a different meaning when viewed from the present.
The exhibition therefore shifts the focus from the outcome to the process. The finished work is one possibility that prevailed among many others. Behind it lie decisions, experiments, mistakes, things discarded and paths not taken. Attending to these traces allows us to ask what happens to everything that remains outside the recognised work.
