Dear friends and colleagues
As I promised here are those elements that might interest you from my review of the Havana Bienal 13, declined by Burlington Contemporary as “too personal.” Although this is not about art from South-east Asia I feel impelled to send it out as this was an exhibition that was too little reviewed. I have not included anything I have written about in recent letters.
Having lived in Europe and then Asia I have become accustomed to Biennales always being bilingual, with catalogues and other information always printed in English. It was a shock to find that the catalogue and wall texts of the current Havana Bienal was resolutely in Spanish, and very little available in English. Given that my Spanish is rudimentary and that the bienal was exceptionally spread out, this review cannot claim to be exhaustive, only referring to what I could see in three days of viewing the exhibition, laboriously translating and talking to artists. There were by my calculation at least forty-three different sites in Havana at which art was exhibited or performed. Nor was everything opened by the time I left.
In Casa d’Asia, one of many beautiful old buildings made available for the bienal, Australain Mia Salsjö’s video work Modes of Translation, 2018 was installed. Ideally, this would be a double projection on two adjacent walls, but there was insufficient space for this here so it had to be blended onto one projection, however it did have its own room. The Havana Bienal which has very little funding from the State or City necessarily depends on improvisation, along with the good will and hard work of both artists and curators. A single projection was sufficient to appreciate the lyrical nature of this piece where a group of violinists play an elegiac piece of music by Salsjö – she is a composer as well as video maker. It is set in the un-restored School of Dance of Cuba, especially the main dome space. The School, designed by the Cuban Modernist Ricardo Porro, is perhaps the most important example of Cuban Revolutionary Modernism. However, in the Soviet era, utopian spaces like this were unwelcome. Porro was ostracised and later went into exile in Paris. Now he is seen as their major architect and the space is preserved and due for renovation. The camera pans around the circular rooms giving the music a slow, ceremonial feel. Whether worn at the request of the artist or not, the shocking pink trousers of one violinist have the same role as the inevitable ploughman in a red waistcoat in Constable’s landscapes has, a counterpoint to the subdued colours of the deserted building. It is a sophisticated work.
In another nearby building the film of Colombian artist Oscar Leone’s Sequence of a man who walks (the earth), was shown. For sixteen days he had been filmed walking from his home town of Santa Maria to the capital city Bogota. Over his shoulder he carried the complete leg of a dead cow. At first in the film he looked with his white boots, like a worker from an abattoir, but as he progressed steadfastly along the coast, through valleys, towns and over mountains one was reminded more of Christ carrying the cross to Golgotha or Sisyphus endlessly carrying a stone up a mountain. We watch him pass by ravaged and pristine landscapes, scenes of dire poverty and incredible wealth, fields of junked machinery and properties protected by barbed wire fences. In a statement he talks of ‘building a relationship with the landscape,’ and of how the partial cadaver of the cow ‘is symbolic of the tensions caused by more than fifty years of inequitable distribution of wealth in Colombia.’ He wants to expose, ‘the religiosity, the environmental crisis, the urban and tourist developments and the latent forms of corruption that have determined the recent history of Colombia.’[1]
His progress is dogged, looking always ahead, walking in silence, but the camera that follows him, often mounted on a drone, periodically slowly rises above the landscape, revealing all that he is walking past, or else it will pan gently across the landscape. It is as beautiful as any travel film, but there is no narrator telling us what we are seeing, or why. Like the best of the works in the bienal it worked either as a discourse on Colombia, if you knew the local or national situation, or as a metaphor, a pilgrimage or penance transposed to the contemporary world where trucks or cars rush past you. That it was also in some way a protest was also obvious.
At the Museo Nacional de Bellas Arte de Cuba several leading Cuban artists showed new works or reconstituted old ones: Kcho (Alexis Leyva Machado) remade his La regatta recargada, of 1993, a vast boat shape spread out on the floor of things, mainly model boats, but including shoes, dolls, driftwood. When such boat works of his first appeared they were read – in the west at least – as emblematic of the small boats people tried to escape from Cuba to the riches of Florida. Now they seem more complex and various in their associations.
Gabriel Orozco, given the status of special guest, had a substantial installation at Edificio de Arte Universale del Museo Nacional de Bellas Arte de Cuba, where “old master paintings” are exhibited. Other than his name there was no text, nor any title was given. Perhaps it didn’t need it. It was a set of twenty or so elegant arrangements of tights stretched over circular or oval boards. They could be seen as sexy or dehumanizing, but they were certainly witty and ingenious.
Beside the core Bienal of 83 invited artists or groups, 17 of them Cuban, there was an exhibition of close on seventy works, mainly sculptural, along the Malecon, the road that runs along the sea front. Some were fun, some were inventive, some were serious. The one that made me stop was a performance by Carlos Martiel, entitled La sangre de Cain, (the blood of Cain). For an hour or more he stood in a small cage of strings anchored to the floor. It was a powerful image, especially when surrounded by a crowd endlessly photographing him. The title was wonderfully ambiguous: did it refer to the blood of Cain himself or the blood shed by Cain of Abel?
Some days later I learned that the strings had been dyed with the blood of artists opposed to Decree 349. But it was far from obvious that the strings were died. Like any coded message (and art under any censorship – East Germany or Suharto’s Indonesia – for example) it spoke through codes, it was far from obvious. However, it was clearly, a statement of protest or defiance.
As with every biennale there was a portentous title: La construcción de lo possible translated in the lead essay of the catalogue as “Rethinking Future”. A second essay by Nelson Herrera Ysla and, unusually signed by the other six curators, suggests as an alternative title “against the odds,” (a pesar de los pesares). Clearly the difficulties of putting this biennale have been considerable: a desperate lack of money, ideological disagreements, a devastating typhoon. Obviously, given the four-year gap since the last biennale the most important thing was to get the Bienal going again, which thanks to the hard work of curators and the good will of artists they did. The Havana Bienal still has great importance, both as a forum for art from the third world, and as one less dominated by commercial interests. It was noticeable how many artists that I had never heard of were being exhibited. Although this Bienal was produced under trying circumstances there were many new features: late in April the entirety of the 3 kilometre street Linea would be given over to public art, with sections allocated for painting, music, writing and dance. Also, for the first time there were satellite projects of the Bienal, outside Havana, including one in the city of Matanzas which included works by many artists from the USA including David Hammons, Julie Mehretu, Carrie Mae Weems, and others in the cities of Pinar del Rios, Camagüey and Cienfuegos.
Speak again soon
Tony
- Artist’s Statement at Havana Biennale 2019 ↑