Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt
(Born out of an artistic action in Havana, Cuba, when, in May 2015, the artist and activist Tania Bruguera held a collective reading of Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951)
Curadores, Go Home
[Curators, Go Home]
Exhibition, 18 June - 18 July, referring to the independent art space "Espacio Aglutinador" in Havana, symbolised by an architectural installation (more about, see the text below).
Works by Sandra Ceballos, Ezequiel Suárez, artists from the 2008 exhibition "Curadores, Go Home", Armando 'Chago' Armada
See the manifesto "Curadores, Go Home" by Sandra Ceballos (in the sliding images above) in which she radically questioned the role of curators in the so-called system of art, as well as the role of the cultural agents of the governing apparatus of Cuba.
Venue: documenta Halle
Espacio Aglutinador, this exhibition
In 1994, cultural officials from the Cuban government censored some of the works in Ezequiel Suárez's show "El Frente Bauhaus" as they were being installed in Havana's Galeria 23 y 12. Suárez and Sandra Ceballos –a fellow artist and the show's curator– decided not to accept the removal of the works, thereby refusing to become yet another of the decade's censored shows. Instead of adjusting the exhibition by removing the censored works, they gathered up all of the works, installed them at home, and invited their friends there for the opening of the full show.
With this firm, spontaneous, and rebellious gesture, they initiated the first independent art exhibition project in Cuba, which they called Espacio Aglutinador. Given the iron grip of the Cuban regime on public space as well as its monopoly over cultural institutions, Espacio Aglutinador's strategy succeeded in transforming private space into an alternative public space for censored artists. This took the Cuban regime by surprise; in response, the regime created mechanisms of harassment for the founders as well as police and institutional pressure for their artists and potential spectators. Espacio Aglutinador is the country's longest-living project for the exhibition of independent artists. It has been the alternative for many artists censored and forgotten by institutions, including those Cuban artists in exile, and some foreign artists as well.
In 2818, the President of Cuba signed into law Decree-349 which invalidates and penalizes the use of private spaces for artistic events that do not have the Ministry of Culture's permission. Even under these conditions Espacio Aglutinador has continued operating. Ezequiel Suárez left the project in 1999; Sandra has continued putting together exhibitions and organizing events at Espacio Aglutinador to date.
INSTAR has invited Espacio Aglutinador to bring to light a type of independent production that seeks routes alternative to the institutions and proposes other dynamics of cultural legitimation.
The aesthetic resource offered by INSTAR for documenta fifteen is a reconstruction, through facsimile, of the memory of cultural events and processes that did not, and do not, depend on the exclusionary mechanisms imposed by the Cuban government. For the reconstruction of this facsimile, we selected all the photos from the archive of exhibitions carried out at Espacio Aglutinador. On top of this accumulation of documentation, we see images of the exhibitions dedicated to the works of Chago Armada, an artist and designer that experienced the censorship of the 1960s and whom Espacio Aglutinador helped recover. The other exhibition to which we refer - and from which we borrowshow. For this project, Sandra invited artists to install any works they desired in the space an our title is "Curadores, Go Home". We are exhibiting the manifesto Ceballos wrote for that d, with this decision, radically questioned the role of curators in the so-called system of art, as well as the role of the cultural agents of the governing apparatus of Cuba. This exhibit includes a collective mural/performance for whose realization artists and visitors were asked to write the names of censors, to mention events and experiences with censorship, and to name censored creators.
In the space we find Ezequiel Suárez's work Ejercicio de close #t23, one of the censored works that gave rise to Espacio Aglutinador in 1994. The works of Sandra Ceballos –created specifically at INSTAR's invitation– complete the room.
(Wall text by INSTAR in the exhibition)
© Photos: Haupt & Binder, Universes in Universe
- also interesting in UiU -
Part 2 of the photo tour through documenta fifteen. 18 June - 25 September 2022, Kassel, Germany. Artistic Direction: ruangrupa. 67 participants.