Tilda Swinton is to perform a new live work at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao this June, created in collaboration with Dom Pérignon and co-created with the French fashion historian and curator Olivier Saillard. The two-day event, taking place on 5 and 6 June 2026, staged in the museum’s Frank Gehry-designed atrium, marks the Champagne house’s most ambitious foray into live performance to date. Tickets are available from 21 May from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website.
Tilda Swinton at Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Titled ‘House of Gestures’, the performance centres on Swinton moving through and inhabiting space, using physical movement and costume changes as a way of evoking character, memory and place. Gesture becomes the sole means of expression; without script or speech, there is only Swinton’s body and what it wears, with garments worn and replaced before the audience, as a way of conjuring stories from an otherwise empty stage.
The piece was developed in close conversation with Dom Pérignon’s chef de cave Vincent Chaperon, whose own thinking about the relationship between wine and landscape runs through the work’s conceptual framework. As he explains: 'A great wine is the place of the soul. It is both landscape and portrait.'
For Swinton, the parallels between performance and champagne are more than merely figurative. 'With performance, we like to create a free zone where something honest and original can occur and become a shared experience in real time,” she says. “A great Champagne has much in common with this idea. Both are rooted in space and authentic presence, not representation or interpretation..'
The Bilbao performances coincide with the unveiling of Dom Pérignon’s 2018 vintage. The new release is the first to be produced entirely under the stewardship of Chaperon, who took sole charge of the cellars following the departure of his predecessor Richard Geoffroy in 2019.
The collaboration is the latest in a long line of creative partnerships that Dom Pérignon has cultivated since 2005, when the maison began working with artists and cultural figures including Karl Lagerfeld, David Lynch, Lenny Kravitz and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
Those projects took the form of limited-edition bottle and packaging designs. Lagerfeld created a studded case for the 1998 vintage, Lynch contributed chiaroscuro-inflected designs for the 2003 vintage, Kravitz applied hammered goldsmith metalwork to the shield of the 2008, while the more recent Basquiat collaboration, realised with the artist’s estate, placed his 1983 painting ‘In Italian’ on a special edition of the 2015 vintage.
The Swinton commission marks a decisive shift from pure product to something more experiential, involving live art staged inside one of the world’s most recognisable museum buildings.
Swinton is among several new collaborators, including Zoë Kravitz, Iggy Pop and Takashi Murakami, brought into Dom Pérignon’s current creative programme, launched in 2025 under the ethos ‘Creation is an eternal journey’. Swinton’s approach as an actress, artist and performer has long centred on the body as a vehicle for meaning, perhaps most famously in ‘The Maybe’ – first staged at the Serpentine in 1995 and reprised at MoMA in 2013 – in which she lay asleep in a glass vitrine, observed by the public without any explanation.
Swinton’s artistic concerns resonate with the themes Chaperon has articulated around terroir and time, not least in the way her performance reflects Dom Pérignon’s relationship with the concept of place. At the house’s vineyards at Hautvillers, near Épernay, the grapes for each vintage are harvested from plots of land with individual names, such as Côte à Bras, Chant de Linotte and Prières. The idea of a named, storied landscape as the source of both wine and meaning is central to what ‘House of Gestures’ sets out to explore and articulate.
Tickets for the public performances on 5 and 6 June are available from 21 May from the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website