For its eleventh edition, the Havana Biennial will once again mobilize artists from all over the world. With the theme of Artistic Practices and the Social Imagination, this event will take place from May 11 to June 11. Nine collective projects and more than 100 guest artists from 46 countries will come together in the galleries, streets, plazas and promenades of this city, joined by a variety of proposals in spaces selected for secondary exhibitions. In parallel, a theoretical program will be held for visual arts critics, curators and researchers.
The list of invited artists includes Marina Abramović (Serbia), Hermann Nitsch (Austria), Ilya and Emilia Kabacov (Russia-United States), Steven Cohen (Johannesburg), Andrés Serrano (United States), JR (France), Bill Vorn (Canada), Jin Shi (China), Carlos Garvalhosa (Brazil), Iván Navarro (Chile), Gabriel Orozco and Damián Ortega (Mexico) and Cubans Carlos Garaicoa, Roberto Fabelo, Alexis Leyva Machado (Kcho), Los Carpinteros, María Magdalena Campos (resident in the United States), Sandra Ramos and Roberto Diago, to mention just a few.
This eleventh edition of the Biennial has sparked great expectations. For those who visit Havana during this event, and for those who live there, the city will be transformed into one big audacious gallery, full of the fresh energy involved in bringing art out into the streets, walking among works by the youngest and most seasoned contemporary artists, or simply contemplating them from a balcony with the sense of a different Havana, exuberant with the airs of the Biennial.
Collective Projects
Behind the Wall
Curator: Juan Delgado Calzadilla
From La Punta to Calle 23, Havana’s malecón will become one of the main venues for the Biennial. Twenty-five artists will intervene in this space with their work (installations, sculptures, performances). The malecón’s wall will divide the exhibition space for these pieces into two, making it into an immense public gallery.
Open Score
Curator: Luis Gómez & Dannys Montes de Oca
The relationship between art and technology is the curatorial line of this exhibition, composed of sixteen Cuban and international artists. In parallel to the exhibition of the pieces, the idea is to convert this space into a kind of symposium or discussion workshop, where technological equipment and applications for artistic formats also will be offered.
Cinema Remixed and Reloaded 2.0
Curator: Andrea Barnwell Brownlee & Valerie Cassel Oliver
Cinema Remixed and Reloaded 2.0 is a project for presenting a sample of work by black women video artists. The sample includes a selection of six videos that are part of the exhibition Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970, which was shown for the first time in 2007 in the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.
Ethics Before Form
Curator: Raffaele Gavarro
Ethics Before Form initiates a journey of investigation based on reflections about art, whether or not it can change the world and how the concepts of ethics and form are influential. It is composed of a selection of five artists whose work contains those same questions.
MAC/SAN
MAC/SAN addresses the practice of art in the public domain and its relevance on the local level. It is a project that has been carried out since 2010 by artists and curators of the LASA (Artistic Laboratory of San Agustín) in a dialogue with the residents of that neighborhood west of Havana. During this Biennial, participating artists will guide guests with printed material and by circulating a daily newspaper. They also will have an online blog, which they will update regularly with reflections and actions by the MAC/SAN.
Shared creations
Curator: José Manuel Noceda & Rewell Altunaga
Shared creations will be held in the Pabellón Cuba every day throughout the Biennial. It is a selection of interactive pieces in which the lucid nature of art emerges. In this case, the spectator will be part of the artwork, because the relationship with the public determines the completion of the piece as an artistic product.
The unprecedented made viable
Understanding, assimilating and being able to verify school as a one big workshop is the theme of this project. Students and professors of Cuba’s University of the Arts (ISA) will exhibit a sample of their artwork in different spaces throughout the university and chat with guests about the work they are doing.
CIFO: a multiple perspective
The Cisneros Fontanals Foundation will bring to Cuba for the first time a collection of contemporary art that will be shown at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
The hunt for success
Curator: Nelson Herrera Ysla
Photographs, paintings, objects and videos will show the change that has taken place in recent years in the way that people build and design their homes, as well as the development of a new type of art connected with the arts and crafts market and the culture industry, led by artists who appropriate great works of modern and contemporary art, either to make versions of them or to merge them.
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Guest Artists
1)- Carlos Garvalhosa
In his work, Garvalhosa plays with the alteration of places. Whether it is a natural landscape, an urban space or a building of any kind, it is modified by an “alternate” proposal for the space in and of itself. This time, the artist will work with the interior of the Gran Teatro de La Habana.
2)- Carlos Garaicoa
The artist will project images of his own interpretation of Havana into a carpeted room. The illumination will give the sensation of walking through the streets of the city.
3)- Damián Ortega
The artist’s proposal is to translate an art book with the collaboration of various people. The outcome will be published and distributed for free during several presentations that he will make during the Biennial. For this, he proposes a kiosk, where he will exhibit this and other books published with similar characteristics.
4)- Gabriel Orozco
For more than two decades, Gabriel Orozco has been considered as one of the most prominent Latin American artists. His work is known for its destabilization of everyday elements.
5)- Hermann Nitsch
Controversial, transgressive and avant-garde, Nitsch is one of the precursors of the syncretism of collective action, music, theater and painting. He is coming to Havana to present a performance that is conceived as an event in time to celebrate life and death.
6)- Ilya y Emilia Kabacov
This prominent duo of contemporary Russian artists will recreate their conceptual piece The Ship of Tolerance, previously built in various cities of the world. Cuban children will make drawings of their interpretations of the word tolerance, and these will form the sail of the ship, which will be anchored in Castillo de la Real Fuerza fortress.
7)- JR
French photographer JR is working this time with José Parlá. Both visited Havana previously to interview and photograph different people. Now, their large-format photographs will be exhibited in different buildings throughout the city with interpretations that José Parlá made for them based on the life stories told by their subjects to the two artists.
8)- Marina Abramovic
The well-known Serbian artist is coming to Havana to give a lecture on the past, present and future of performance art, based on her personal experience. She will also screen the documentary The Artist is Present, featuring the development of her artistic career.
9)- Alexis Leyva Machado (Kcho)
Kcho will participate extensively in the Biennial. An exhibition of previously unexhibited works from his collection in La Cabaña, an exhibition of El David as part of the exhibition of artists invited to the Biennial, in the Gran Teatro de La Habana and a public intervention on Havana’s seaside boulevard, the malecón.
10)- Los Carpinteros
The artistic duo Los Carpinteros, made up of Dagoberto Rodríguez and Marco Antonio Castillo, has created mostly sculpture and installations, with themes related to everyday life. This time, they will give a street performance: a conga with dancers and musicians titled AGNOC the irreversible conga.
11)- María Magdalena Campos
She belongs to the so-called 1980s generation of Cuban art. She currently lives in the United States, but it would be hard to situate her in any single geographical area. Her work involves the theme of African descent, among others.
12)- René Francisco and his Fourth Pedagogical Pragmatics students
Generous City is the collective project of René Francisco and his Fourth Pedagogical Pragmatics students. Each member of the group will build his or her own architecture, house, region or enclosure. Based on symbolic configurations, the artists resemanticize archetypal spaces within urban contexts.
13)- Behind the Wall
1. Roberto Fabelo Hung / 2.Marianela Orozco / 3.Rachel Valdés / 4.Inti Hernández / 5.Humberto Díaz
14)- Open Score
1.Patricia Clark / 2.Fernando Rodríguez / 3.Barry Moon, Patricia Clark, Luis Gómez / 4.Leslie García / 5.David Maroto / 6.Antonio Gómez Margolles
15)- Project Cinema Remixed and Reloaded 2.0
1.Maren Hassinger / 2. Berni Searle / 3.Carrie Mae Weems / 4.Kara Walker / 5.Tracey Rose
16)- Shared creations
1. Beatriz Lecuona, Oscar Hernández / 2. Aluan Argüelles / 3. Marcel Pinas / 4.Jin Shi
17)- The unprecedented made viable
ISA, Cuba’s University of the Arts
18)- Cifo : a multiple perspective
1.Atelier Morales / 2.Ana Mendieta / 3.María Fernanda Cardoso / 4.José Damasceno
19)- The hunt for success
Manuel Larrañaga and Ismary González
