By: Carina Pino Santos / Images: Taken from Casa de África’s Facebook 11/24/2024
The 15th Havana Biennial has begun in a city celebrating its 50th anniversary, while the main event of visual arts in Cuba and one of the most far-reaching of its kind internationally is celebrating four decades of its existence this year.
Today it can be conclusively stated that our Biennial is the most atypical of what is now called the Global South and even of the world at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. It has developed over four decades in parallel with the complexities that have shaped what we call contemporary art today, and it has managed to make visible artistic productions and creative practices that were unknown before this event, among other important successes. Although, as we know, referring to its achievements should not reduce us to praise alone, it is very fair to highlight how each edition has been possible, among other factors, due to the iron will and preparation of specialists, art critics, curators, journalists, and support staff in general who deal with countless difficulties of all kinds to make it a reality.
“Today it can be conclusively stated that our Biennial is the most atypical of what is now called the Global South and even of the world at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century.”
In this order, one of the elements that differentiates our Biennial from the rest of the already numerous existing ones is that it is done with an extremely modest economy of resources compared to the usual investment required to produce this event at an international level. Right now its realization is progressing marked by a frugal sobriety that cannot be compared with the usual investment required by this type of meeting of international artists who today come to the island by their means and resources and pay for the transport of their works to install them in a Cuba with enormous difficulties in daily life, and which has suffered for more than half a century the longest blockade in universal history, by the most powerful government in the world.
Shared Visions at the House of Africa in Old Havana was one of the first exhibitions that opened the day after the inauguration of the 15th Biennial. Its curators, the American artist Ben Jones and the specialist in African art and Cuban art, José (Pepe) Fernández, constitute the duo in charge of the exhibition. They took on an exhibition that is part of the museum installation of that center, with the inconveniences that this implies from the museographic point of view and of the space needed to exhibit the works of 25 Afro-descendant artists who come mainly from the United States, while there are also artists from Brazil, Portugal, Nigeria, and the Dominican Republic, all of whom are united by a marked interest in exhibiting in Havana. Likewise, the collective exhibition includes 16 Cuban artists of great prestige in the country’s artistic panorama.
The inclusion of more than forty works distributed throughout the floors of the Casa de África building and displayed among pieces of museum value favors a look at the theme of Afro-descendants who create an art of decolonial resistance in contemporary times, without ceasing to openly and dynamically interweave in it, references to multiple identities in a global world. At Casa de África, a program has been articulated that includes various arts, whose opening was a panel on Brazilian Afro-descendant artists referring, among other topics, to the culture of language, religion, and the indigenous community.
In addition, the program includes music with performances such as that of Beatriz Márquez (called in Cuba “La musicalísima”), hip-hop by Magia Cabrera and her group, Alejandro Mayor and his jazz group and Vocal Baobab; There will also be a screening of films by Afro-descendant filmmakers Hassan Aliyu (England), Gloria Rolando (Cuba), Arturo Lindsay (Panama) and Robin Holder (United States). It should be added that most of the international participants are residents of North America who are now challenging strong currents of opposition to Cuba.
Ben Jones said at the opening that “the propaganda we receive in the United States about Cuba is negative,” and he highlighted the work of the artist and educator Mansa K. Mussa, and the work of the person he called the soul of this project, the artist Toni Thomas. More than the exhibition, what contributes the most, I believe, is the relationship between the artists who come from the United States and other countries and joining with the Cubans, in a communion among all on the subject addressed. Ben Jones himself, the organizer of “Shared Visions” from the United States, has come to Cuba more than a hundred times: “I feel like I am from here,” he tells me in his Spanish with a Spanglish accent. Jones was born in New Jersey in 1940 and in addition to being an artist, he is a professor and activist for environmental causes and has been a promoter of exchange between the two countries.
A decade ago, he was the curator and coordinator of the exhibition Afro-American Artists and Abstraction that was shown at the Universal Art Museum in Havana, and on that occasion he brought a group of artists, musicians and intellectuals from the United States. I would like to pause here and draw attention to the possibility of meeting between Cuban artists and those residing in the United States since for several decades the option of an exchange was not common for Cuba. In this sense, the Havana Biennial has been one of the best examples of connection between the Island and the United States over these four decades.
“One of the elements that distinguishes our Biennial from the rest of the already numerous existing ones is that it is carried out with an extremely modest economy of resources compared to the usual investment required to produce this event at an international level.”
In the field of visual arts, these exchanges began in the early 1980s, in a spiral of interest that has increased over the decades, and in which other cultural actors from the United States also participate, such as collectors, students, artists, curators, academics, writers, musicians, among many others. Participatory projects and great popular reception such as Behind the Wall, one of the most successful in the Cuban event, have always included works by artists from that country from the beginning. In this intersection, some motivations stem from a history that links traditions and ethnic culture between both countries, as is the case with the theme of common African roots.
A good example of this has been the participation of Cuban Magdalena Campos-Pons, a resident of the United States for more than two decades, who has brought the project “Intermittent Rivers” to her hometown, Matanzas, during the biennials, revitalizing the relationship with visiting American artists and in the same way they have contributed to making Cuban artists known in the country of the North. No less significant has been the work in the field of artistic research of one of the Cubans who has most deeply studied Cuban artists living in the United States, Dr. Yolanda Wood, a prestigious art historian, who has delved into the creation of those artists in an environment radically different from the Caribbean. She and other experts have also made their ideas known through the international workshops of the Program of Studies on Latinos in the United States, organized by the Casa de las Américas in Havana, an institution that has served as an essential link for the exchange of Cubans and Latinos in general who carries out their work on art, music, theater, literature, and research in the field of culture from the United States and in the hemisphere.
Since then, contacts through institutions, centers, and individual artists have been increasing, based on a historical cultural and artistic relationship that has antecedents, even before the revolutionary period, to strengthen those ties of exchange after 1959 and until today in the sphere of visual arts, favored by the cultural and artistic programs of Cuban institutions and the Ministry of Culture of Cuba. Among the large group of Cuban visual artists, the curator Pepe Fernández selected first-rate creators who have re-semanticized and recreated African roots and thus included Manuel Mendive, Michel Mirabal, René Peña, Roberto Diago, Ramón Haiti, among others. Choco, for example, took up a work from those he made during his time in Angola years ago, Guinguindo, which he recreated in 2018; Roberto Chile includes a work in which multiple photos appear as a mural; Jorge Mata has left us a jewel of a book-art work entitled The Artist’s Book, a different reading, in which he has added a 7-minute video to the book itself with its magnificent images; the Cuban sculptor José Duverger has extracted a two-meter sculpture from a trunk, an openwork figure in which he displays a technical mastery worthy of mention; Luis Lamothe has been included, an artist who died young and whose woodcut work on display reveals the connection with that distinctive figuration that characterized him.
The works of the Cubans are on the upper floors, to which is added that of an Italian video and installation artist, Cristiano Berti, who participates with his historical and artistic research project Boggiano Futile Cycles. Berti exhibits the family tree of Liberata Boggiana, an African of the Mandingo ethnic group who bears the surname of her owner, since the merchant Antonio Boggiano, who settled in Trinidad as the owner of a coffee plantation and was a slave trader, gave his surname as a brand to her and to the slaves in his possession who in turn passed it on to their descendants. The American Orlando Cuevas exhibits an installation that appeals to the educational importance of play, and to the coincidence between the rhythms of the seasons, nature, and the four suits of the deck. On a table he erected houses of cards created by him, which were the object of intervention by the public, and above all, it was of great attraction to the children who played with the cards, and whom Cuevas motivated with a performance as a magician. Descended from Puerto Rico, this artist who cultivates circus art, painting, and installation, was a school teacher, and the work he presents in Havana was previously exhibited in the United States, before arriving here in the Caribbean.
Shared Visions has the value of addressing, from the discourses of art, creation from the perspective of artists who feel an identity connection as Afro-descendants.
The collective exhibition on display at Visiones Compartidas has the value of addressing the creation from the perspective of artists who feel an identity link as Afro-descendants or creators who identify with the problem, so their works reveal the importance of their signs, images, themes, and individual, social and political commitments in a time when global capitalism continues to impose relations of domination over peoples and individuals throughout history.
In the seas, the jungles, Indigenous populations, and in migrations, these continue in their dramatic displacements, in their intercultural interweaving, and in the evolution of their cultural practices in which a rich spiritual, religious, and knowledge imaginary that has antecedents in Africa, even today challenges patterns, tensions and behaviors from neocolonial and Eurocentric culture.
The opening of Shared Visions at the Casa de África, on Obrapía 157 between Mercaderes and San Ignacio, culminated with the drumming of the Cuban group Descendencia Rumbera. From now until March 2025, the public who attend will be able to enjoy much more than what these lines attempt to cover which, of course, goes beyond these pages.
