SCAN #
00003
DATE
c. 2011
TITLE
MAKING ART GLOBAL (PART 1) THE THIRD HAVANA BIENNIAL 1989
RACHEL WEISS + OTHER AUTHORS
Published by Afterall Books
DESCRIPTION
The third edition of the Bienal de La Habana in 1989 took place the same week that the Berlin Wall fell. This critical juncture in time - signaling the unraveling of the Soviet sphere of influence - positioned Havana at a crossroads of uncertainties, making the third Bienal a site where artistic practice intersected with the reconfiguration of the world order.
TAGS
#cuba
#exhibition
#curatorial
SCAN #
00002
DATE
c. 1993
TITLE
FACE OF THE GODS: ART AND ALTARS AND THE AFRICAN AMERICAS
ROBERT THOMPSON
Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title presented by The Museum for African Art, New York
DESCRIPTION
In the Afro-Atlantic world the concept “altar” is double: fixed (tree, fire, stone) and moving (dancing, circling, ecstasy), like Yoruba double meaning Egún (ancestors, bones).
Face of the Gods retrieves a flourishing visual culture that has been entirely ignored by Western art history. In Professor Thompson’s decision to include priests like Balbino alongside contemporary Cuban artist Jose Bedia, Thompson leveled the arbitrary, academic distinction between “artist” and “nonartist,” revealing that African traditions of altar making constitute a vital art form in their own right.
TAGS
#objects
#cuba
#yoruba
#photography
SCAN #
00001
DATE
c. 2002
TITLE
OBJETS RÉINVENTÉS: LA CRÉATION POPULAIRE À CUBA ERNESTO OROZA
Printed in Paris, FR
DESCRIPTION
Objets Réinventés: La Création Populaire à Cuba (Reinvented Objects: Popular Creation in Cuba) invites you into the Cuban home, laboratory of repair, restoration, and reinvention, encompassing eight years of Oroza’s research on the island’s material and industrial culture. By studying how Cubans invent and manufacture objects to overcome economic restrictions, Oroza showcases models of behaviour and reactions to technology itself, but above all to the authority and veracity that these capitalistic products supposedly embody. These practices are grouped together under the concept of « technological disobedience » - the way in which Cubans disobey and betray the object - they disrespect its original identity, the authority this identity holds and the truth it conveys.
In order to subvert the narrative of a society “ruined by scarcity”, it is critical to recognize Cuban objects as a form of ingenuity, as radical design and as a way to survive.
“Rather than produce art as either separate from or belatedly responsive to social conditions, Oroza’s work pivots around the collection of objects ‘that are at the same time an understanding of a need and the answer to it’ (Weiss, 2018). Described as an ‘impromptu ethnographer of Cuba’s DIY culture’ (Gil, 2016), Oroza’s work foregrounds the relationality of repair and invites an encounter with the world as repairable. Archiving instances of reparative intervention in the living environment of Havana, Oroza’s work moves towards a mode of aesthetic resistance, acting, as it does, against the logic of object utility and the incessant demand to ‘use it all up.’” From Repairability as a Condition of the World: Ernesto Oroza’s Archive of Dis/repair [*]
TAGS
#technological
disobedience
#radical design
#objects
#cuba