Affirmation Of The Curatorial Class - Seventh Havana Biennial art exhibition

Afterimage, March, 2001 by Gregory Sholette

November 22, The Fotateca in Plaza Vieja

Iconofilla (2000) is a series of short video segments made by Colombian artists Restre-po Hernandez and Jose Alejandro. It opens with the line, "Good morning sweet images, I want to see more." Over the course of an hour the piece offers numerous stories a la carte about the eye. Some appear to be news clips or appropriated TV programs, while others are documentary footage possibly shot by the artists themselves. Among the shorts is a scene from a Colombian soap opera in which a bandaged women falls in love with her handsome surgeon after he restores her sight. There are also groups of mourning mothers wearing enlarged photographs of their dead children who have been shot in street assassinations. A chubby boy is fit with a glass eye that inserts with a loud plop. This is followed by spectral images of Mary and Jesus that appear in the bottom of coffee cups, on stained walls and even in the reflections of ice cream vendor's carts. The final startling but morbid episode is about a woman who proceeds to take sev eral frame shop employees hostage after she discovers they have lost her family photograph. It concludes with the distraught woman shooting herself in the head. Iconofilla made me think of the pleasures and sorrows of looking at, making and writing about art. It also made me think about my own gooey, ocular organ; for a moment I imagined it to be a secret betrayer--a conspicuous parasite--drawing me, and thousands like me, here to Havana for its own inscrutable purpose. Plop.

November 23, offsite from the Biennial again

We visit Mosquera at his home in the Havana suburb of Cerro. Mosquera tells us that an estimated 1500 Americans have come to this year's event, many for the first time. He expresses his Fear that the Biennial's growing size will in fact distance people from the work on display. He describes his own concept of such exhibitions, including the one he co-organized in Johannesurg, South Africa several years ago, as a space For living. Biennials, he suggests, should be smaller and more carefully articulated, with integrated workshops and conferences. He then adds, they should also have cheap bars for meeting and discussing ideas.

One thing, however, is certain. Despite the intentions of the Biennial organizers, even Cuba is affected by the influence of the global contemporary art market. It may be that ideas of universal progress, once a promissory note for a better future, pledged by both capitalism and communism, appear today as cynical slogans of free-market hegemony. Yet if, as Mosquera conjectures, art biennials are modeled on such century-old, modernist beliefs, they nevertheless must also maintain some relevance for intellectuals and reformers. For all of its problems the Septima Buenal De La Habana reflected this need. The desire to return the festival to its original intentions, including the critique of the global art market, is a clear example of that recognition. That this return is not possible especially when so much labor is spent on attracting international art consumers (the first ever contemporary art auction to take place in revolutionary Cuba occurred during this year's Biennial) only underscores the conflict betw een ideals and historical materiality. However, the Biennial also highlighted the work of architects and planners currently re-building the old section of Havana itself. It is a massive project aimed at saving an extraordinary urban zone that UNESCO proclaimed a World Heritage Site in 1982. Perhaps, like the city of Havana, the exceptional aspects of modernity can be salvaged through a similar process of slow and tedious restructuring. Nevertheless Havana, a city neither in the present nor the past, hangs like a droplet off the leaf of history. Meanwhile a wind blows from the North. [5]