Other fears is the title of the exhibition that the Museum of the University of Navarra dedicates to Antoni Muntadas, one of the most relevant contemporary artists of his generation, who has articulated his work as an expression of critical spirit, the landscape of the media, and the intersection of art with various disciplines and methodologies.

The exhibition is organized around a new work, presented to the public for the first time, produced by the Museum within its artistic residency program Tender Bridges. Titled Between fears (2022–2025), it is part of a project, a series of works initiated by the artist in 2005, which analyzes the ways in which Western societies have placed fear as one of the main political arguments since the beginning of the 21st century.

This proposal studies fear as an integral, though invisible and intangible, part of the encierros of San Fermín. Presented as a video installation that envelops the viewer “between ground and sky,” the work provides an unusual and unexpected image of the festival and the collective rituals that are part of it. Iconographically abstract, the installation gives sound a leading role and also offers an alternative vision to the clichés that dominate the image of the city and its most emblematic celebration. Other fears is a unique work in the artist’s production. It represents fear within a dramatic structure led by sound and with an iconography that tangentially portrays the city. In a way, the work recovers the urban experiences lived during the period of confinement caused by the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when the production of the piece began.

The exhibition also includes a selection of existing works that, within the same line of interest, provide a context for the reception and understanding of this new piece, presenting other expressions of fears that, in various parts of the world, confirm this psychological, social, and political paradigm shift of global scope. In 2005 and 2007, Muntadas produced two video works that are projects of “television intervention” about two specific places in the world, two broad borders of great symbolism in which the “fear of the other” is staged, driven by the rejection of immigration and racism. On translation: Fear/Miedo (2005) and On translation: Miedo/Jauf (2007) gather interviews with people who experience the tensions in these areas daily, along with television archive footage referring to the term “fear” at the border between Mexico and the United States on one hand, and the Strait of Gibraltar — which separates Spain and Morocco, Europe and Africa — on the other, as well as notes and contributions by the artist. These videos seek to convey how fear is a “translated” emotion on both sides of the borders from very different perspectives. On Translation: Fear/Miedo was created to be broadcast between August and November 2005 from locations that somehow connect centers of power and decision-making with the places where these policies are manifested daily: Tijuana, San Diego, Mexico City, and Washington, D.C. On Translation: Miedo/Jauf is not a work about emigration/immigration from Africa to Europe, nor about religion or terrorism. It addresses the construction of the South as fiction and reality connected to phenomena of the unknown, the exotic, and the different, or the attempt to understand and perceive hope in a continent “forgotten” by the Western world — Africa — as a promise for the future.

On the other hand, Alphaville e outros… (2011) is a video that was part of the installation of the same title and was based on Alphaville, a “walled” residential neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil. Narratively very different from the previous works, the piece examines the phenomenon of “gated communities” and how fear and the search for exclusivity lead to urban isolation and exclusion. This work takes as a reference Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 film Alphaville, which offers a dystopian, science fiction vision of a totalitarian urban future. The black-and-white scenes of Godard’s film are juxtaposed with almost utopian promotional images of the Brazilian “Alphaville.” Muntadas presents an architecture and organization of space based on the rhetoric and mechanisms of fear and control.

The construction of fear (2008–2025) is a work that refers to the place and time in which the piece is created. A selection of newspaper headlines (local and national) from the months preceding the opening of the exhibition, containing the words “fear” and similar terms such as “panic” or “terror,” is reconstructed as a mural using the same typefaces in which they were originally printed. This work represents a map of the local fears of the place where the exhibition takes place in that same year… and it has been exhibited in places such as Alicante, Amman (Jordan), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Caracas (Venezuela), and Paris (France), among others.

The exhibition is completed with the edition Fear, panic, terror (2011), composed of five framed panels, each including six book covers published in the United States, whose titles include the concepts of fear, panic, and terror. The work reflects how the publishing industry has commercially exploited the different types of fears felt by English-speaking societies while exponentially increasing the collective sense of fear and its various expressions and consequences.