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.


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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...

EASTER MORNING
© » KADIST

Bruce Conner

2008

Unlike many of his earlier films which often present poignant critiques of mass media and its deleterious effects on American culture, EASTER MORNING , Conner’s final video work before his death in 2008, constitutes a far more meditative filmic essay in which a limited amount of images turn into compelling, almost hypnotic visual experience...

27 Punk Photos: 11. Dim Wanker: F Word, May, 1978
© » KADIST

Bruce Conner

1978

In 1977, as an already-established artist best known for his films, Bruce Conner began to photograph punk rock shows at Mabuhay Gardens, a San Francisco club and music venue...

Burrito Bay
© » KADIST

George Kuchar

2009

Burrito Bay is a video by George Kuchar that follows the format of a diary or travelogue centered on a tropical trip to Acapulco, Mexico...

I (heart) Data Mining
© » KADIST

Amy Balkin

2012

Data mining is a computer software process that can involve the neutral or benign analyzing of internet data for patterns, however, it can also imply the more sinister activities of surveillance or subject-based information gathering...

Sitting Feeding Sleeping
© » KADIST

Rachel Rose

2013

In the 2013 video work, Sitting Feeding Sleeping , Rose combines footage taken of zoo animals living in captivity with screen images that flicker and flash before us...

The Syphilis of Sisyphus
© » KADIST

Mary Reid Kelley

2011

In the video The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), Reid Kelley transported her heroine to the French demimonde...

Sweet Jesus
© » KADIST

Lutz Bacher

2016

Sweet Jesus is a sound installation by Lutz Bacher that consists of a found recording of James Earl Jones’ iconic voice reciting biblical genealogy from Matthew, Book 1...

Domes, #1
© » KADIST

Judy Chicago

1969

Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...

Sultana's Dream
© » KADIST

Chitra Ganesh

2018

Art of War 1, City in Broad Daylight, Leaving the House, Justice is a Virtue, and Lions are Stronger than Men are linocut prints from the series Sultana’s Dream ...

Mom
© » KADIST

Sadie Benning

2017

In borrowing and subverting images from popular culture, Sadie Benning exposes the media’s role in constructing false and oppressive stereotypes of women, with regard to gender and sexual identity...

Mickey Mouse
© » KADIST

Paul McCarthy

2010

To make Mickey Mouse (2010), Paul McCarthy altered a found photograph—not of the iconic cartoon, but of a man costumed as Mickey...

Green Box
© » KADIST

Ari Marcopoulos

1998

A photograph of a tin box full of marijuana simply titled Green Box, speaks to the constantly changing status of the substance–once taboo or illicit, now a symbol of a growing industry in Northern California...

Rabbithole
© » KADIST

Chitra Ganesh

2010

Rabbithole by Chitra Ganesh is a digital animation that refigures a fundamental plot device in myths and fables...

This is not in Spanish
© » KADIST

Sergio De La Torre

2011

This is not in Spanish looks at the ways in which the Chinese population in Mexico navigates the daily marginalization they encounter there...

Untitled (Untitled Passport II)
© » KADIST

Colter Jacobsen

2010

The title Untitled Passport II was first used by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in an unlimited edition of small booklets, each containing sequenced photographs of a soaring bird against an open sky...

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...

Charles Baudelaire
© » KADIST

Mary Reid Kelley

2015

Kelley’s 2015 portrait of the poet Charles Baudelaire is one of a series of poets, rappers, and other thinkers who have influenced the artist’s ideas about beauty, creativity, and expression...

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...