Tania Bruguera conference:
Aesth-etics: Learn from Others
Contact zone: repairing crisis
- Day: April 26
- Time: 7:00 p.m.
- Venue: Aljub
- Face-to-face activity with prior registration and limited places
Es Baluard Museu presents the public conference by the artist Tania Bruguera within the framework of the “Contact Zone” programme, an annual training and research programme that aims to explore the potential of artistic practice and cultural production as devices for intervention in social change. In its second edition, the need to think about contemporary complexity is presented from five thematic axes: New institutionality, Environmentalisms, Feminisms, Borders and Works.
Bruguera points out that “artists have always had a relationship with power, in some cases close, in others more critical, but now it is politicians who use artistic and aesthetic resources to pretend to be something they are not. Symbolic mimicry, the performativity of data and the right to the final interpretation of things are resources used by totalitarian governments that have learned from their artists”.
The activity is open to the general public, as a starting point for module 4 of the LAP programme (Laboratory of Art and Thought) in its second edition.
From this thematic block of the LAP entitled “Deconstructing borders, decolonising knowledge” dedicated to visible borders and invisible borders, this module looks to explore experiences of social innovation related to the heterogeneity of migratory phenomena, the demographic changes that these phenomena produce and the place occupied by people, families and communities that have migrated or are refugees, their rights (or non-rights), their vulnerabilities and the multiplicity of invisible borders. It seeks to question what we understand by integration, which, as Bonaventura da Sousa states, can be either authoritarian or solidary. The former imposes the way in which a system wants groups to integrate, while the second adapts the conditions of inclusion depending on the groups that arrive, and in collaboration with them.
Tania Bruguera carried out her studies at the Escuela Elemental de Artes Plásticas 20 de Octubre and at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, as well as at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she also taught between 2003 and 2010. Her work is based on her interpretation of political and social issues. In order to define her artistic practices, she has developed concepts such as behaviour art with a focus on the limits of language and the body confronted with the reaction and behaviour of her spectators. Additionally, she proposes a useful art to influence the real transformation of certain political and legal aspects of society. Bruguera’s work focuses on issues of power and control and questions the present context in her native Cuba. She created the Cátedra Arte de Conducta in Havana in 2002 and the Asociación de Arte Útil in 2011 as platforms for encounter and the implementation of her projects. In 2016, she inaugurated the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (INSTAR), with the mission of creating an institutional platform in which Cubans can learn about their civil rights, promote critical and informed discussions, and form part of an alternative political space. She has taken part in international artistic events such as the documenta in Kassel and the Venice, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Havana biennials, and has exhibited in museums, galleries and art centres such as the Tate Modern, the Art Institute of Chicago and the New Museum in New York, among others.