60:00 minutes
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera. These are very successful in transcending the local into the global and/or universal. Memory, surveillance, and the routine and/or familiar, life in terms of both the political life and the social collective life shared by the constant reminder of the shut-off island psychological landscape.
Context is everything when it comes to the work of Humberto Diaz. Context in the limitations of technology in Cuba, context in the construction of an audience that is grounded on the idea of a shared experience, and context in the daily struggle to find the poetic in the everyday and the quotidian. Out of context they still resonate with authenticity and a genuine feel for the poetic, video as a tool for formulating quick ideas, observations and notations within one’s own environment.
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera...
Victory at Sea is a simple mechanism made from cardboard and found materials that mimics the Phenakistoscope, an early cinematic apparatus...
The photograph Proxy II (Beetles) by Robert Zhao Renhui belongs to a series, titled Christmas Island, Naturally, that focuses on the ecology of Christmas Island; a remote volcanic land formation in the Indian Ocean...
The two works in the Kadist collection, Observador Pasivo and 3600 besos por hora by Diaz are culled from a vast compilation of videos and performances for the camera...
“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life...
A child and dreamer my whole life long (broken tree) (2004) is a sculpture made of filler, wire, copper, oil paint, and wood depicting a tree just at it’s moment of breaking into half – one part alive with foliage and blooming branches and the other the crisp of the break exposed, with the trunk adhered solidly to a plinth...