Tania Libre

2016 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

74 minutes

Lynn Hershman Leeson

location: San Francisco, California
year born: 1941
gender: female
nationality: American
home town: Cleveland, Ohio

Tania Libre is a film by Lynn Hershman Leeson centered around renowned artist Tania Bruguera and her experience as a political artist and activist under the repressive government of her native Cuba. The film begins with the voice of Tilda Swinton narrating a manifesto of artists’ rights written by Bruguera in which she expresses her views on art, our universal right to both enjoy and create art, and the duty that artists have to dissent. The film then captures a series of therapy sessions between Bruguera and Dr. Frank M. Ochberg—the founding father of trauma therapy, particularly PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome—where Bruguera describes with great candor and earnestness several traumatic experiences such as the betrayal by her father who handed her to Cuban secret service, and her imprisonment in Havana years later after advocating for freedom of expression. Their conversations expose an intimate yet profound analysis of Cuba, surveillance and the politics of repression embedded in government and family structures.


Lynn Hershman Leeson is a celebrated Bay Area artist and filmmaker internationally renowned for her pioneering use of new technologies to explore key social issues. Her prolific body of work spans over four decades: from her early conceptual and performance works where she constructed an ‘official’ civilian record for her alter ego Roberta Breitmore, to her more recent works that intersect with the field of science to explore themes of identity, privacy, surveillance and the complex relationship between humans and technology, and the real and the virtual world. Hershman Leeson also addresses these key themes through her filmmaking, which is highly idiosyncratic and socially engaged. A notable example is her acclaimed documentary !Women Art Revolution , which focuses on the Feminist movement in the USA.


Colors:



Lesbian Beds
© » KADIST

Tammy Rae Carland

2002

Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated...

Scene I am Cuba
© » KADIST

Felipe Dulzaides

2006

I Am Cuba— “Soy Cuba” in Spanish; “Ya Kuba” in Russian—is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm...

Nuevo Dragon City
© » KADIST

Sergio De La Torre

2008

Nuevo Dragon City is a reenactment of a historical event from 1927 in which six Chinese were either trapped or voluntarily hid themselves inside a building in northern Mexico...

Priapus Agonistes
© » KADIST

Mary Reid Kelley

2013

Priapus Agonistes by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley is the first work in The Minotaur Trilogy (2013-2015), a trio of videos that reimagine the Greek myth of the Minotaur...

Related works featuring themes of: » Color Photography, » Cultural Commentary, » Feminism, » Film/Video, » American  
» see more

Borrando la Frontera
© » KADIST

Ana Teresa Fernández

2011

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

Radical Hospitality
© » KADIST

Andrea Bowers

2015

Bowers’ Radical Hospitality (2015) is a sculptural contradiction: its red and blue neon letters proclaim the words of the title, signaling openness and generosity, while the barbed wires that encircle the words give another message entirely...

Other related works, blended automatically  
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!Women Art Revolution
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2010

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W...

Borrando la Frontera
© » KADIST

Ana Teresa Fernández

2011

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...

Frontier-Linear
© » KADIST

Doug Aitken

2009

The version of Frontier acquired by the Kadist Collection consists of a single-channel video, adapted from the monumental installation and performance that Aitken presented in Rome, by the Tiber River, in 2009...

Related works sharing similar palette  
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After Reality
© » KADIST

Zhou Tao

2012

After Reality is a video by Zhou Tao, which was born out of his residency with the Kadist Foundation in Paris in 2012-13...

Henri Rousseau Portrait of Joseph Brummer Gifted To National Gallery
© » ARTLYST

An addition to its collection: The National Gallery has acquired the Portrait of Joseph Brummer by Henri Rousseau (1844–1910) through the Simon Sainsbury Bequest...

Parallel Events The Grip/ La Mainmise
© » KADIST

Saturday, December 4 at 3 pm at Kadist Visit of the exhibition in the presence of the artists : Kate Mitchell, Ms&Mr and Arin Rungjang Please RSVP: assistant@kadist.org Wednesday, December 8 from 7 to 9pm in the Auditorium of Jeu de Paume “Fabrications: The Theatre of Everyday Life” presented by David Teh and Dougal Phillips “Unreal Asia” a thematic programme originally conceived for the 55th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2009...

Banksy Seems To Confirm First Name In Lost Interview Found In Cupboard
© » HUFFINGTON POST

A BBC journalist recently shared audio from a minidisc he discovered in his home...

Related works from the » 2010's created around » San Francisco, California  
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Silencer #16 & #17
© » KADIST

Will Rogan

2010

MUM , the acronym used to title a series of Rogan’s small interventions on found magazines, stands for “Magic Unity Might,” the name of a vintage trade magic publication...

Serengeti Green
© » KADIST

Phillip Maisel

2015

While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...

Chu’u Mayaa
© » KADIST

Clarissa Tossin

2017

Clarissa Tossin’s film Ch’u Mayaa responds to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House (constructed 1919–21) in Los Angeles, an example of Mayan Revival architecture...

There are veins in these lands, I
© » KADIST

Rodney McMillian

2013

In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...

Other works by: » Lynn Hershman Leeson  
» see more

!Women Art Revolution
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2010

Hershman Leeson’s documentary, Women Art Revolution (W...

Strange Culture
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2007

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s genre-bending documentary Strange Culture tells the story of how one man’s personal tragedy turns into persecution by a paranoid, conservative, and overzealous government...

VertiGhost
© » KADIST

Lynn Hershman Leeson

2017

Using the seminal 1958 film Vertigo as a launchpad, Lynn Hershman Leeson explores the blurred lines between fact and fantasy in VertiGhost , a film commissioned by the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco...

Related works found in the same semantic group  
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Recent Human Movements: Tania Bruguera and Adriana Camarena, hosted by Brian Karl
© » KADIST

Artist Tania Bruguera presented the first phase of her ambitious five year long project Immigrant Movement International...

Pro-Palestine Protestors Interrupt Tania Bruguera Event in Berlin, Causing Her to End Performance Early
© » ARTNEWS

Pro-Palestine Protestors Interrupt Tania Bruguera Event in Berlin Skip to main content By Alex Greenberger Plus Icon Alex Greenberger Senior Editor, ARTnews View All February 12, 2024 10:46am Tania Bruguera performing Where Your Ideas Become Civic Actions (100 Hours Reading The Origins of Totalitarianism) at the Hamburger Bahnhof...

Becoming Jamila
© » KADIST

Drinks at 6pm, Event at 7pm The third in a series exploring the relationship between cinema and contemporary video and performance art, Becoming Jamila takes Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers as its primary point of departure...

É Noite na América (It is Night in America)
© » KADIST

Ana Vaz

2022

Ana Vaz describes her film É Noite na América (It is Night in America) as an eco-terror tale, freely inspired by A cosmopolitics of animals by Brazilian philosopher Juliana Fausto; in which she investigates the political life of non-human beings and questions the modern idea of the exceptionality of the human species...