Another Day. Another Night. An Endless Trial: Barbara Kruger at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Outside the curved metal walls of the Guggenheim Bilbao, men with dark hands and easy smiles sell counterfeit designer bags and football jerseys, the nylon straps of their makeshift storefronts gripped tightly in case they need to run. It is a play of survival; one we see across European capitals, choreographed in private and always staged at the margins of grandeur. Inside, Barbara Kruger’s voice booms through speakers, across LED panels, printed vinyl walls, and disorienting projections. It echoes sharp truths; truths about ownership, illusion, consumption, power. The pain is stabbing but familiar…we’ve encountered the point of these knives before. The irony is almost unbearable in its perfection.

Barbara Kruger: Another Day. Another Night. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

In Another Day. Another Night., Kruger holds a mirror to a society that can’t stop looking at itself. Her genius is in the fact that she doesn’t need to orchestrate anything. She simply lays bare the scaffolding of power, and power performs the rest. The exhibition spans her early editorial-style photo collages and plunges into an immersive audiovisual space where her signature black, white, and red provocations are blown up to engulf the viewer. The scale is not incidental. Kruger doesn’t just amplify her message, she magnifies our entrapment within it, rendering the spectacle inescapable. The text, as always, is accusatory, often framed in the second person. You want it. You buy it. You forget it. Sometimes it slips into the first person, where the confrontation becomes more intimate. I shop, therefore I am. It’s desire masquerading as identity and consumption branded onto the soul. In the quiet between these phrases, the heat of Kruger’s gaze burns, still unflinching after all these years.

Barbara Kruger. No Comment. Installation view, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, November 29, 2024-April 21, 2025. Courtesy the artist, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Anders Sune Berg

The effect is dizzying. It feels less like being inside a gallery and more like existing inside an argument you’ve been avoiding for years.

Kruger’s work isn’t about Trump. It isn’t about the latest political scandal, the newest war, or yet another censorship law. But that’s what makes it terrifying. Her images and phrases, first materialised in the Reagan-era ’80s and matured through the cultural static of the ’90s, feel as poignant now as they did then. The language of propaganda has simply rebranded itself. Now it scrolls, tweets, markets itself in carousel ads and protest infographics. But still, Kruger is speaking of the same things: exploitation, beauty, violence, and, ultimately, complicity. We still believe in the myth of ownership, the spectacle of romance, the sanctity of borders. We still sell ourselves for attention. We still confuse choice with freedom.

Somehow every phrase still lands like a fresh bruise. Her work indicts structures so stubbornly enduring that they no longer feel like crisis, just life.

Barbara Kruger. Bitte lachen / Please cry. Installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, April 29- August 28, 2022. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers / Mies van der Rohe, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022. Photo: Timo Ohler

What Kruger captures beautifully is the emotional machinery behind oppression. The way love is used to discipline. The way fear is weaponised as virtue. The way we’re taught to feel ourselves into submission. In one room, a digital swirl of sound and image tangles the American Pledge of Allegiance with marriage vows and legal testaments, unraveling the unthinking repetition behind sacred texts. Elsewhere, censored love letters are pressed against pop song lyrics, and soundscapes mimic the poppy cadence of a valley girl vocal fry, only for the words to curdle into a sinister commentary on desire, censorship, and shame. In this liminal space, rituals of love and nationalism become parallel performances of surrender. It becomes hard to tell which words were meant for devotion and which for control. Maybe they were always both. 

It’s funny, until it’s not. But that’s the point. Kruger is unafraid to be ridiculous. She understands that absurdity is not the opposite of seriousness, it’s one of its most cutting tools. She weaponises the entire spectrum of human emotion to show how emotion itself has been weaponised. 

Barbara Kruger: Another Day. Another Night. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Photo by Angel Oseghale.

This isn’t the aesthetic instagram feminism we have become so accustomed to. The work is existential. She doesn’t flatter the viewer with empowerment. Instead, she places us on trial. Her text-based art is a defiant prosecutor, hurling questions rather than offering comfort: Whose hopes? Whose fears? Whose values?

What’s most interesting is the way, in this exhibition, she turns her gaze on herself, on the reproduction of her own work, on how her visual language has been absorbed, diluted, memeified, and mass-circulated. Rather than resist, she repurposes the repurposing. She doesn’t cry theft, she demonstrates the cycle. Her art anticipates its own mimicry. She loops slogans, recycles graphics, and utilises shared aesthetics. She hasn’t run out of ideas, these are features. Repetition is her medium as much as text. Like nature, like the internet, like trauma, art, too, lives in loops. It’s a cyclical ecology, meaning gets recycled, contaminated, reborn. Everything is reused and everything is haunted.

Barbara Kruger. Untitled (Money talks), 1984. Photograph and type on paper 16.5 × 20.3 cm; 38.1 x 41.3 x 3.8 cm (framed). Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers. Photo: Ben Westoby

Outside again, the immigrants still stand guard beside their counterfeit goods. Their presence, just beyond the curve of the museum’s architecture, is not incidental; it’s the ghost inside the machine. Kruger’s questions bleed through the museum walls and meet them there: Who is free to move? Who is free to belong? The exhibition’s title Another Day. Another Night. is an admission and a call to arms. The struggle has never begun or ended with the news cycle. It is inscribed in the texture of the everyday.

There is beauty here, but it is beauty tempered with rage; Kruger has always known how to laugh through a scream. The show is provocative, even funny at times, but it’s never flippant. It takes seriously the absurdity of our lives, and that is where it triumphs. Today, everything moves too fast, Kruger slows us down just long enough to see the inner workings of the machinery. And she whispers, You are part of it too.

And, indeed, we are.