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- CUBA: Artist & Curator Tour “About Her, about Me, and about Them”
CUBA: Artist & Curator Tour “About Her, about Me, and about Them”
4.13 Sat. 11:00—12:30
y gion
[ESP / JP]
Free
KYOTOGRAPHIE 2019 Poster
Photo by Alberto Korda, René Peña, Alejandro González
Please join the Cuban Curator Cristina Vives; Diana Díaz, the daughter and Estate of Alberto Korda; and the artists René Peña and Alejandro González, during a walkthrough the exhibition. This tour will allows the visitors to approach to some of the most important historic moments, and social, politic and economic events occurred in the island in the last 60 years, and its effects and reflection in the photographic art scene. The more that 100 images in the exhibition and the possibility of a Q&A with their authors will illustrate decades of radical changes, dreams, hopes and also deceptions, from the point of view of its protagonists.
All art that calls itself Cuban, whether or not made in Cuba, bears the seal of the country’s history and the existential drama of its inhabitants. Its creators have not succeeded in resisting the need to issue judgment on that history or simply identify themselves in it. It is an unavoidable art-life-society interconnection. About Her, about Me, and about Them is a way of thinking about part of that recent history through photography.
About Her, about Me, and about Them is an unfinished trilogy about a country under permanent construction.
All art that calls itself Cuban, whether or not made in Cuba, bears the seal of the country’s history and the existential drama of its inhabitants. Its creators have not succeeded in resisting the need to issue judgment on that history or simply identify themselves in it. It is an unavoidable art-life-society interconnection. About Her, about Me, and about Them is a way of thinking about part of that recent history through photography.
About Her, about Me, and about Them is an unfinished trilogy about a country under permanent construction.
- Please Note:
- * This is a free event but booking is required.
* It is recommended to arrive at least 10min before the event starts to avoid disappointment,
* 5min before the event start we will fill the remaining seats.
©CeCé Studio Havana- Cristina Vives
- Independent art curator and critic based in Havana. Co-Founder in 1994, with the photographer José A. Figueroa, of Estudio Figueroa-Vives, recognized as one of the first independent Contemporary Art spaces in Cuba. Co-author of the anthology Memoria: Cuban Art of the 20th Century, Ed. California International Art Foundation, Los Angeles, 2002. She was a J. Paul Getty Scholar, Los Angeles in 1994 and 1995 and National Award for Curatorial Work in 1989, 1990, 2007, 2009 and 2010. An author of critical texts on Contemporary Art and Photography published by national and international magazines and catalogues. Special Mention of the Guy Pérez Cisneros National Award for Art Critic, Havana, 2011. She is the curator of numerous exhibitions in Cuba, United States and Europe from 1986 to the present. Author of the monographic book Korda Conocido Desconocido published by Steidl, Gottingen and La Fábrica, Madrid, 2008. Her books I Insulted Flavio Garciandía in Havana (2009), José A. Figueroa. A Cuban Self-Portrait (2010), Nkame. Belkis Ayon (2010), and The Inevitable Space on the work of Alexandre Arrechea (2014) have been published by Turner, Madrid. Her more recent book Belkis Ayón. Behind the Veil of the Myth has been published by the Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston. She is a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), of the Advisory Committee of CIFO Art Foundation Miami/Madrid, and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Paris.
©Ismael Fransisco- Diana Díaz Lopez
- From 1963 to 1970 studies classical ballet in the National School of Art in La Havana. From 1970 to 1990 she was a dancer in the prestigious Cuban National Ballet, as well as Maitress of the company between 1990 and 2003. Upon her father’s death, distinguished photographer Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (Korda) she assumes the direction of his Estate, which has as main objective the preservation, promotion and research of the this prominent photographer. As the Estate of Alberto Korda, Diana Díaz represents the maximum authority in the preservation of the artist’s important legacy.
©René Peña- René Peña
- René Peña (La Habana, 1957) emerged in the Cuban photographic scene in the late 1980s, old enough to recall the revolutionary epic but not to feel it as his own. His generation was destined to live through the collapse of the geographical cartography of international socialism. Peña was born in a time of utopia and lived through the years that led to its dissolution. Those were years in which artists’ themes and the objects of their research changed from the collective to the personal, and the role of the individual gained risky prominence. The language of art changed as well, becoming enriched with the interconnection of artistic disciplines – the installed space, the performative act, and the ephemeral gesture joining the collectable object – and overflowing previous classifying barriers. René Peña’s generation became sarcastic, and issued critical judgment through simulation. Each of the scenes constructed by Peña to date is a structure of the thoughts contained in his own body. This is not, as some have defined it, a form of transvestism, but the construction of a stage – his body – where the different acts of the history he was destined to live are represented. Independent of his own will, Peña acts as a highly social individual – literally, a body – repeatedly marked by the material circumstances, the arbitrariness, the double moral, the intolerance, the loss of values, the gender conflicts, and the social inequalities of his country’s recent past.
©Alejandro González- Alejandro González
- Alejandro González (La Habana, 1974) was born when everything still seemed to indicate that a better future was possible. He grew up waiting for that promised future. His photos explore the empty spaces of untold stories or social segments that were not represented in the official photography. Capturing events and people not considered eligible by the powerful, the artist unveils historical gaps avoided by power. Using actors and reconstructing scenarios, he photographs truths that were concealed from us. Each of his series, generically entitled Re-construcción (Re-constructions) is the result of rigorous historical research, and simulation makes them no less credible. González has studied the mega projects (many of them unsuccessful) contained in the Revolution’s economic development plans of those decades, as well as the essential moments that marked the radical course of social policy and ideology. He has constructed models employing recycled materials in order to “repeat,” but from a critical point of view, photos that originally documented important political events of the country. His photographs weaken the political ritual, use irony to expose the economic fantasies, unveil the ruins, make evident the rhetoric and the demagogy, and point out the mistakes. He can do this from the distance granted to him by virtue of his not being a witness of the events. That enables him to tell us about “them” from a perspective we feel is closer to objectivity.
- y gion
- 19, Benzaiten-cho, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto, 650-0086
Subway Tozai Line “Sanjo Keihan” station / Keihan Line “Sanjo” / “Gion Shijo” station. 5 min on foot from exit 2 (Sanjo Keihan / Sanjo) / 9 (Gion Shijo)
