Tania Bruguera

TANIA BRUGUERA (Cuba, 1968).
"The weight of guilt", 1997-1999.
Photograph C-print. Copy 1/3.
Signed and titled on the back.
Measurements: 150 x 97 cm; 152 x 101 cm (frame).
The photographs of "El peso de la culpa" correspond to a performance carried out by Tania Bruguera on May 4, 1997 at her home in Old Havana. In the action Bruguera stood in front of the Cuban flag woven with human hair by the artist. Around her neck hung a slaughtered ram. The performance lasted approximately 45 minutes. During this time she poured water on previously collected soil from her country and then ate it. Bruguera explained that "This act was related to a similar ritual of suicide, practiced by the indigenous people of the island in the face of the pressure of the Spanish invasion. One of the photographs from the same series is part of the collection of MUDAM (The Contemporay Arr Museum of Luxemburg).
For more than twenty-five years, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera has focused her artistic production on socially engaged performances and installations, in which she examines the nature of political power structures and their impact on the most vulnerable groups in society. Bruguera has received numerous grants and awards, receiving the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in Art for Latin America and the Caribbean (2008), an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and the Yale World Fellowship. Likewise, in 2015 he received the prestigious Herp Alpert Foundation Award, in California. It will be this same year, in 2015, when she returns the Distinction given by the National Culture and renounces to the membership of the National Union of Writers and Political Artists, thus criticizing the cultural policy of the Cuban regime. Director of the International Institute of Artivism "Hannah Arendt" (INSTAR), in 2014 she tried to carry out an anti-government performance in the Cuban Revolution Square, an act led to her arrest, withdrawing her passport and accusing her of resistance and public disorder. Tania Brugera is currently represented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, which acquired her installation "Untitled, Havana 2000" in 2015, which will be exhibited until March 2018. That performance consists of a long, dark tunnel whose scenographic set-up resembles the interior of La Cabaña Fortress, witness to the political captivity, torture and extrajudicial killings of opponents of the Castro Revolution during the 1960s. The artist understands "Untitled, Havana 2000" -like the rest of her artistic production- not as a provocation, but as historical documents that show us the mistakes of the past. The installation "Untitled, Havana 2000" was excluded from the Seventh Havana Biennial in 2000 for including naked men and censored from, precisely, the "real" La Cabaña, due to the -according to Bruguera- message and connotation of the work. Likewise, his work has been included in Documenta 11 (2002) and the Venice Biennial 2015, exhibited at the Tate Modern in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and many other renowned museums and institutions.