New Exhibition Funded with Curator Fellowship Opens in Havana

Yanelys Nuñez Leyva

HAVANA TIMES — At the close of December, an exhibition by visual artist Israel Castellanos, funded with a Estudio 21 curator fellowship which the artist received in 2013, opened at Havana’s Center for the Development of the Visual Arts. Estudio 21 sponsors an exhibition of this nature every year.

The winning project, titled Manipulacion mediatica en el arte cubano contemporaneo (1993-2014) (“Media Manipulation in Contemporary Cuban Art”), takes up most of the central gallery (excluding spaces devoted to personal exhibitions by artists Luis Gomez and Eduardo Ponjuan). This is a massive exhibition, in which each individual piece has plenty of space for itself.

This is why one should walk through the exhibition space slowly, take one’s time at the replica of the cyber-café, check out a few issues of Enema, Loquevenga or P-350 at an improvised reading area and stop to look at the film posters, paintings, installations and audiovisual materials that may be thrown together in the same room or occupy more intimate spaces.

The exhibition brings together work groups and individual artists belonging to different generations, who have satirized the information provided by the media or have used the language of the media to conceive an alternative discourse.

What is common to all of the works on display is the fact they all aim to criticize the logic of the mass media.

The exhibition will be showing through January 17, 2015 at the Center for the Development of the Visual Arts located in the Plaza Vieja of Havana’s Old Town.

Click on the thumbnails below to view all the photos in this gallery. On your PC or laptop, you can use the directional arrows on the keyboard to move within the gallery. On cell phones use the keys on the screen.