Dialogue in the dark: David Bowie meets Nina Simone at Steve McQueen’s exhibition at Guggenheim Bilbao
Steve McQueen Brings Nina Simone and David Bowie Into a Shared Space at Guggenheim Bilbao
Poinews.com – Visitors entering Steve McQueen’s new installation at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao encounter near-darkness, soft flooring and a soundscape built around two instantly recognisable voices. Nina Simone and David Bowie appear to be singing to one another across the room, though the meeting exists only through McQueen’s artistic construction.
The work, titled 66–76–26, places Simone’s 1966 recording of “Wild Is the Wind” in conversation with Bowie’s 1976 interpretation. Simone can be heard from one side of the installation, while Bowie answers from another. Their performances are separate recordings, made a decade apart, yet McQueen’s arrangement gives them the emotional charge of an intimate duet.
At its centre is a song about longing, vulnerability and love. McQueen first heard “Wild Is the Wind” 30 years ago, and the piece grows from his response to the intensity both musicians brought to it. The composition was originally written by Dmitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington for the 1957 film Wild Is the Wind, where it was performed by Johnny Mathis. Simone later transformed the song, and Bowie’s rendition followed as a tribute to the emotional world she had created.
Two recordings, one emotional exchange
McQueen sees Simone’s version as a profound reinvention rather than a simple cover. Her reading pushed the original into a radically different register, giving it a slow-burning sense of desire and ache. Bowie, while drawing from her approach, took the song elsewhere again.
“She took that song and took it to another stratosphere. So by putting these two versions together, it's complimentary,” McQueen said. “They're both singing A major. And it's one of those things where I just felt that by putting those two things together, these two stones, it makes fire.”
The artist believes the imagined pairing honours both performers. Although Bowie and Simone never recorded “Wild Is the Wind” together, they did meet in 1975. Simone’s daughter wanted to attend a Bowie concert, bringing her mother along; the musicians met afterward. For McQueen, that personal connection adds another layer to the installation’s sense of closeness.
“[Nina Simone’s] daughter wanted to go to David Bowie's concert, so she dragged her mother to take her, and they met afterwards. I think [that] Bowie version is almost homage to Nina. There's a certain kind of imitation of her voice, but then it goes somewhere,” McQueen said.
The installation does not require visitors to arrive with detailed knowledge of either singer, the song’s history or McQueen’s wider career. Its force lies in physical presence: listening in darkness, sensing the distance between the voices and allowing the music to unfold over time.
Curator Lekha Hileman described the exhibition as an experience grounded in attention rather than specialist interpretation.
“This is an exhibition that’s very experiential. It's about feeling, it's about being present,” Hileman said. “It's about slowing down and just receiving something. So in that way, it's very universal.”
McQueen has described the viewer as the work’s other voice. That idea gives each person in the gallery an active role. The audience is not simply overhearing a musical exchange; it completes the space between Simone and Bowie through its own memories, associations and emotional responses.
A title that connects music, history and the present
The numbers in 66–76–26 mark the years associated with the work: 1966 for Simone’s recording, 1976 for Bowie’s version and 2026, the year the installation is being presented in Bilbao. The title also invites a consideration of the historical distance the song has travelled.
Both recordings emerged during unsettled political eras. Simone’s version arrived amid the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Bowie’s followed the Watergate scandal and a decade defined by social and political uncertainty. McQueen’s work does not turn the song into a historical document, but it places those periods beside the present, suggesting that love, instability and the need for connection remain recurring human concerns.
“Particularly now things seem very turbulent. And I think when things are very turbulent, the things that you hold on to are the things which are precious to you, which is love,” McQueen said.
“And again, I know it sounds sort of corny, but it's important because that's the basis of us all in one way, shape, form or the other. That's what we crave and that's what we need. So to come back to some kind of understanding of love is important, at least for me,” he added.
A major museum presentation for a filmmaker and artist
The Guggenheim Bilbao exhibition opened on 9 October, McQueen’s 57th birthday, following six years of planning. While he is widely known as the director of 12 Years a Slave, for which he won an Oscar, Golden Globe and BAFTA, his career began in contemporary art.
McQueen also earned major recognition for Hunger, including the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Before those landmark films, he established himself as an artist whose work explored image-making, time, bodies, memory and the way audiences perceive what is placed before them. He represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and has exhibited at Tate museums in London.
Alongside 66–76–26, Guggenheim Bilbao is presenting a film programme devoted to McQueen’s cinematic work. The parallel presentation offers a way to trace the relationship between his gallery installations and films: both ask viewers to slow down, confront duration and consider how sound and image shape emotional understanding.
In Bilbao, the encounter between Simone and Bowie becomes more than an exercise in musical comparison. Their voices, separated by years but joined through McQueen’s staging, create a space where personal feeling meets cultural memory. The result is a quiet but expansive reflection on what survives through changing times: the desire to be heard, the need to connect and the enduring pull of love.
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