Glenda León: A Tree Falls in the Forest

Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao presents the works of the artist Glenda León (Havana, 1976) at the exhibition entitled A Tree Falls in the Forest.

The exhibition unfolds as a panoramic retrospective of Glenda León's work, conceived as a choreographic score in which each proposal activates a singular and open experience. Using a hybrid language that shifts between installation, photography, video and sound in constant dialogue with music, word, and body, the artist creates a perception space where the visible and invisible, material and spiritual, intersect. 

A Tree Falls in the Forest is structured in three interconnected areas: firstly, a political-social hub delves into the tensions of contemporaneity—polarisation, mechanisms of power, censorship and paradoxes of progress—both collectively and intimately. The second area deals with nature as a system of correspondences, revealing patterns and resonances that connect diverse phenomena through a perspective that is simultaneously scientific and poetic. A third perspective is directed towards the spiritual, understood as a shared dimension that embodies the duality connecting its artistic and personal codes.

Far from offering set answers, Glenda León’s practice inhabits the interstices between reality and fiction, articulating a subtle discourse in which sound, image and shape, thought and perception, invite both critical contemplation and an expanded sensitivity that questions the way in which we inhabit the world.

All of this emerges from a minimalist aesthetic and a conceptual ambition that shape a language of remarkable formal subtlety. A language proper to the twenty-first century that enables us to voice its crossroads.

Curatorship team and project management: Fernando Pérez, Glenda León and Iván de la Nuez

Glenda León (Havana, 1976)
Glenda León lives and works in Havana and Madrid. Her works extend from drawing to video art, and includes installation art, object-based practice, sound, photography, and performance. She graduated in History of Art at the University of Havana (1999; Cuba), and earned a Master’s Degree in New Media from Kunsthoschule für Medien, Cologne (2007, Germany).

The artist has developed a strong international trajectory, with solo exhibitions at museums and arts centres in Europe, America, and Asia. She has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions at highly prestigious institutions.

She represented Cuba at the 55th Venice Biennale and has participated, inter alia, at the Dakar Biennale (Senegal), the Havana Biennale (Cuba), and the Aichi Triennale (Japan). She has won the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Prize, the Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation, and the Cifo Prize for mid-career artists.

She has received numerous acknowledgements such as the 2024 CIFO Prize for Grants and Commissions in the Mid-Career Artists category (2023); the Pilar Juncosa & Sotheby’s Biennial Award for Artistic Creation (2021); the DKV Prize (2020); the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2020, 2005), and the LARA Prize (2017). Her works can be found in major public collections such as the Pompidou Centre (Paris, France), The Museum of Fine Arts (Houston, U.S.A.), and the Musée des Beaux Arts (Montreal, Canada).

Azkuna Zentroa—Alhóndiga Bilbao. Bilbao Society and Contemporary Culture Centre
Azkuna Zentroa is the Bilbao Society and Contemporary Culture Centre, with a local and international perspective open to dialogue with different community groups. Azkuna Zentroa is a place to take part in culture as a practice, process and space for experiences, through four lines of programming: Visual arts, Performing Arts, Film and Audio-visuals, and Literature. These lines dialogue among themselves generating a hybrid, multiple and expanded programming. Always with education as a way to generate critical knowledge and transform society through art and artists.