Sculpture (Sculpture)

From the series the Old and the New (XI) by Carlos Garaicoa belongs to the series Lo viejo y lo nuevo / Das Alte und das Neue (The Old and the New) which was first exhibited in 2010 at Barbara Gross Gallery in Germany. Here, Garaicoa’s interest in vernacular Cuban architecture shifts towards the European context: a series of twelve nineteenth-century French engravings have been reworked into delicate paper models. Here, the two-dimensional old-school architectural renderings have become the foundation for new hollow three-dimensional structures.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

White Corner (2006) is a video installation, projected on two protruding perpendicular walls. On one level the work constitutes a self-portrait of the artist, whose image is projected on both walls, separated by the corner. Yet while facing, they don’t quite confront each other.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Open Mind is a model created by Capote for a traversable public maze that, when seen from above, resembles the human brain. Because individual movement through the maze echoes the movement of neurons and a larger aggregated whole, visitors can be seen to enact a model of sociality and public space that both embodies and metaphorizes social consciousness. Capote’s model shows not just the proposed structure, but features figurines as well, to illustrate the possible scale and interactivity of the final piece.

Photography (Photography)

In Amantes (Lovers) Juan Carlos points his lens at his own environment, his underground (literally) studio in Havana. A beautiful and intimate image of a seedy yet casual scene of two lovers in the background foreshadowed by a beautiful young woman smoking a joint in the foreground, a very powerful and not too subtle political representation of the current realities and truth of youth life in Havana. Juan Carlos Alom is an artist known for his documentary photography of Cuba’s subcultures and underground scenes.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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. The movie was not well received by the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until its rediscovery thirty years later by American filmmakers. The movie’s acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise-en-scène prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.

Photography (Photography)

Behind the simplicity and beauty of this untitled photograph of a brilliantly-colored flowerbed by Félix González-Torres are two remarkable stories of love, loss, and resilience. As with most of his works, the photograph is untitled followed by a parenthesis that provides some context clues. In this case, an inscription on the reverse of the photograph reads: For Laura (Alice B. Toklas + Gertrude Stein Flower Bed in Paris).

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Discrepancies with Oaxacan Textile II by Leonor Antunes is a hanging sculpture composed of three elements made of brass. This sculptural work was originally produced for the exhibition Discrepancies with Clara Porset (2018) at Museo Tamayo, which featured reassembled objects from early 20th century Cuban designer Clara Porset. Antunes’s work explores Mexican traditions through a contemporary context.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Los amantes (The lovers) Diana Fonseca Quiñones uses simple, commonplace objects and experiences that she derives from daily life to develop narratives that mix reality and fiction. Drawing on seemingly everyday moments, such as lighting a match, Quiñones creates poetic metaphors that cleverly comment on broader social issues, as well as politics, and universal human desires. In her profound work Los amantes, the humblest of materials, a pair of burning matches, becomes a parable for the sharing, longing, restraint, and death that everyone faces in life.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Makeover

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and riffing on the “I Want You” army recruitment campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s, Labat asked Bay Area residents to interpret the slogan and make their own demands of the public in a series of live performance auditions. Given one minute to seize the voice of authority, contestants were asked to be the finger-pointing Uncle Sam, and their performances—as on the TV program American Idol —were voted on by a live audience. Five winners were chosen and their image and slogans appeared on posters throughout San Francisco to coincide with the presidential elections.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

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.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the film La Edad de Oro (The Golden Age) Javier Castro asks several children to describe what they want to be when they grow up and what their best career option is in Cuba. Their responses are telling: some hopeful or playful in nature as one would expect, and others crudely revealing the harsh reality that the children perceive. The work takes its title from a children’s magazine produced by José Martí in 1889, during the years leading to the Cuban War of Independence from Spain in which Marti lost his life.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Shot a few months before the USA and Cuba restored diplomatic relations in 2015, The New Man and My Father looks into the quiet aftermath of one family’s individual experience of the Cuban Revolution (1953-1959). The film brings to the fore a socio-political system made for a country whose successes and failures fell upon the individual men and women who experienced it. In the film, Melis interviews his father about the Cuban Revolution, as well as the more recent re-introduction of capitalism to the island after 60 years of the US-imposed embargo.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Cuba, due to the lack of materials, workers of state-owned construction companies must remain at work without doing anything, waiting for the end of the working day. Interested in this phenomenon, Adrian Melis asked the workers of a construction company to reproduce the sounds and noises characteristic of their work. The making of forty rectangular pieces for a floor construction is the recording of a “work performance” during a day from eight in the morning to five in the afternoon.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Modelled and rendered in 3D, Moving Target Shadow Detection by Sung Tieu reconstructs the entire interior of the Hotel Nacional de Cuba in Havana, the site of the first-known instance of a supposed sonic attack, which collectively became known as ‘Havana Syndrome’. First reported by CIA staff in the Cuban capital in 2016, the syndrome includes a range of unexplained disorders ranging from nausea, fatigue and memory loss to brain injuries resembling concussions. In Tieu’s film, CCTV camera footage and images taken by a nano drone lead from the hotel’s lobby to an occupied hotel room, where the viewer is confronted with classified documents and news reportages of the recent Havana Syndrome attacks around the world.

Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Goicolea has made drawings based on a family album of relations that he did not know but who in one way or another contributed to his history and to the predicament in which he now finds himself as a Cuban in America. He then mounted the drawings on trees, telegraph poles or buildings and photographed them. Taken in these situations the drawings appear like advertisements for lost people or even posters for wanted criminals that of course conjures up images of loss not only of boat people but those who perished in other disasters, whether natural catastrophes or 9/11.

Photography (Photography)

Goicolea has made drawings based on a family album of relations that he did not know but who in one way or another contributed to his history and to the predicament in which he now finds himself as a Cuban in America. He then mounted the drawings on trees, telegraph poles or buildings and photographed them. Taken in these situations the drawings appear like advertisements for lost people or even posters for wanted criminals that of course conjures up images of loss not only of boat people but those who perished in other disasters, whether natural catastrophes or 9/11.

Installation (Installation)

Addressing the 1966 XVII World Chess Olympics, Pataki 1921 by Ulrik López continues the artist’s interest in chess as a subject and as a symbol for various world affairs and political confrontations. Pataki 1921 is an installation that derives from and expands on Cuban choreographer Alberto Alonso’s ballet piece titled La partida viviente (The Living Match) which opened the Olympic. The choreography recreates the 1921 World Championship chess match where the Cuban player José Raúl Capablanca won the world title against the German master Emmanuel Lasker, becoming the first Latin-American, but more precisely Caribbean, player to win this title.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera. As suggested by Castro, the color of this man’s skin allows him to pass unnoticed perhaps literally, but also metaphorically as he alludes with certain humor to the iconic work Black Square by Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich, often referred to as the “zero point of painting” in Western art-historical discourses.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In the video Blanco sobre Blanco (White on White) , we see a white man appearing in a white screen embedded into a white wall— alluding to Malevich’s White on White series. Analogously, in Castro’s related work Negro sobre Negro (Black on Black) all we see is a completely black screen on a monitor that is recessed into a wall, also painted black. Gradually, the face of a man becomes visible as he steps out of the darkness and closer to the camera.