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The exhibition takes the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum’s collection as its starting point, with more than one hundred works being temporarily displaced and developed upon at Tabakalera to offer a unique story about art and memory. Its title comes from the play That Time by Samuel Beckett (1976), in which the Irish poet and playwright interweaves three voices that refer to three different moments in the life of the protagonist: the voices of youth, maturity, and old age. Likewise, the showing is structured through a circular visit around Tabakalera’s exhibition spaces, in three areas reflecting three voices that recreate the past (Voice C), the present (Voice A), and the future (Voice B), placing the visitor before three different aspects of the collection’s time and history. Past and present were two fundamental focuses of the collection work at Bilbao Fine Arts Museum starting in 1908, including significant examples of artistic manifestations arising between the 2nd century AD and our times. On the other hand, the Tabakalera centre, whose mission includes promoting contemporary creation, art, and present-day debate, presents itself as an ideal location to offer a new context for the museum’s collection. As such, «That Time» addresses the collection with a perspective firmly based in the present that swings like a pendulum between both past and future eras.

The beginning of the exhibition presents eleven busts from different sculptors and eras that draw attention to the memorial nature of portraits that, faced with the fragility of the world and temporary things, keeps alive the memory of those lost. It encourages memory and brings it from the past to another time (the age of the living) and another place (the present). Behold the anonymous works and those difficult to date, with others created by well-known artists. Among those depicted, are individuals that were famous in their day (painter Aurelio Arteta, African-American dancer and singer Joséphine Baker), and others now unknown. Owing to the portrait, these eleven people are placed in eternity’s timelessness.