74 minutes
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.
Carland’s series of large-format photographs Lesbian Beds (2002) depicts beds that have been recently vacated...
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 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...
McCarthy’s Mother Pig performance at Shushi Gallery in 1983 was the first time he used a set, a practice which came to characterize his later works...
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...
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...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
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...
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...
Fridge-Freezer is a 2-channel video installation where Yoshua Okón explores the darker side of suburbia, d escribed by the artist as “ the ideal environment for a numb existence of passive consumerism and social a nd environmental disengagement...
In the performance video Vitrina , María Teresa Hincapié stood inside a storefront window in downtown Bogota, unannounced, for eight hours a day, wearing a uniform and initially carrying out cleaning chores...
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...
While his works can function as abstract, they are very much rooted in physicality and the possibilities that are inherent in the materials themselves...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
In his evocative Landscape Paintings, McMillian uses second-hand bedsheets, sourced from thrift shops, as his starting point...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In this film is the story of two neighboring yet philosophically opposing nations: Russia and Norway...