Tate Modern will stage a special recreation of Cuban artist Tania Bruguera's performance Tatlin's Whisper #6 in the Turbine Hall as an act of solidarity with Bruguera - who was recently detained in Cuba preventing this performance being restaged in Havana's Revolutionary Plaza.

The work was first performed in 2009 at the Havana Biennial to provide a temporary platform for free speech, a highly emotive issue in Cuba. Audience members were invited to speak uncensored in public for one minute on a subject of their choice.

We invite you to come and participate in this performance in support of Bruguera, and for all other artists around the world who face criminal charges and violence for exercising their basic human right to free expression, by speaking in the Turbine Hall on a topic of your choice for one minute, on Saturday 18 April, 14.00-16:00.

This action took place on May 20th, Anniversary the Republic of Cuba.

Materials: Cubans, Visitors, 1 dove, 1 armchair, The Origins of Totalitarianism book, 1 Loudspeaker inside and 1 loudspeaker outside of the Institution, Lectures and discussion recorded and send them via email from persons outside the country would like to be part of the piece, Cultural officers, Cuban State Security agents, Movement 'Respuesta Rapida', Repudiation act,

Courtesy of Studio Bruguera and Yo Tambien Exijo Platform.

Hispanic Heritage Month

A leading political and performance artist researching ways in which art applies to everyday political life, Bruguera will discuss art and politics. "Political art," she says, "is art that has consequences." And Bruguera understands consequences firsthand. Recently released from a months-long house arrest by the Cuban government for attempting to restage one of her performance pieces in Havana, Bruguera has been at the forefront of freedom of expression throughout her career. The New York Times has said, Bruguera is an artist "whose work blurs and sometimes obliterates the line between socially conscious performance art and straight-ahead social work."

Bruguera studied art at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work, which was been widely exhibited internationally, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Currently the artist-in-residence for the City of New York's Office of Immigrant Affairs, Bruguera is tasked with helping the agency recruit undocumented immigrants for the new, popular identification card program, IDNYC.

Politics, Policy and the Arts

• Access VIDEO

From Havana to Beijing, authoritarian governments continue to crack down on artists whose work sheds light on the social, political, and economic struggles faced by local populations. Yet despite increasing censorship and persecution, artists continue to engage with and shape political consciousness, both at home and abroad.

A conversation between Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist, who was arrested in Havana last year after staging a provocative open-mike performance and Paul Ramirez Jonas, a New York City-based artist whose work challenges the boundaries between artwork and spectator, on the role artists can play in creating social, political, and cultural change.

Frieze Talks

• Access AUDIO FILE

Delivering her first UK lecture after being detained in Cuba for eight months, Tania Bruguera speaks about her politically motivated practice, and her belief that if it is to be political, art must have consequences.

Artspace is very pleased to announce it will hold an open forum/workshop for artists to spend the evening with eminent Cuban performance and installation artist Tania Bruguera brainstorming and discussing what art projects/initiatives/work/change they'd like to see in the New Haven community.

Tania will devise a piece to be performed that enacts some aspects of what our community has discussed. Participating artists may be invited to help realize the performance, which will take place the following week.

Workshop at Artspace. A light dinner to fuel the discussion will be served. Free.

The line you met outside was us. We are participants in this city. New Haven inhabits us. We work and live in its sectors. We hustle, day dream, work day jobs. Some of us are students, and some of us were, once, or would be. We are talking. We read. We spend time on The Green. We look out through windows.

We walk the streets and watch. We are aware of each other, and tonight we receive you, en masse, so that you are aware of us. Perhaps you came to The New Haven Museum looking to honor an art institution, perhaps you came to reconnect with old friends. Either way, to join the reception you had to encounter our reception first, which may have looked like two New Haven community members making eye contact, or shaking hands.

Perhaps you wished we weren't there; you didn't want to approach. Or maybe the gesture of our solidarity and differences attracted you, and you thought to join us. Either way, you did not pass through the museum doors unacknowledged. Within the line, our eyes met and hands touched.

SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT

Tania Bruguera, Matteo Lucchetti, Judith Wielander

Continuing the dialogue started at the Summit held at the Venice Biennale in August, the New York Summit was dedicated to education and other ways knowledge is disseminated and obtained. The Curriculum NYC focused on the effects of specific education policies in the United States. We explored the relationship between knowledge and geopolitics, pedagogical art practices, omissions in contemporary curricula, and political issues such as the re-segregation of public schools and student debt.

In addition to hosting presentations by a distinguished roster of over 50 participants, the Creative Time Summit: The Curriculum NYC invited attendees to join in our afternoon sessions, which comprised break-out sessions held in the school's classrooms. Taking the form of workshops and open discussions, they provided opportunities for more intimate exchanges among attendees, special guests, Summit presenters, and students and teachers from the Boys and Girls High School campus, which includes the Nelson Mandela School for Social Justice, and Research and Service High School. While diving deeper into urgent pedagogical issues, the breakout sessions addressed topics specific to the field of socially engaged art.

Performa 15

Responding to the invigorated voice activism has found online, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (@TaniaBruguera) employs Instagram as an activist platform, exploring the connections between art, activism, and political change, and how social media bridges gaps in communication and catalyzes radical thought.

For Performa’s first Digital Commission, Bruguera engages followers as online citizens with the hashtag #instacitizen, using as her medium the Internet's emergent role as civic arena and the immediacy with which information travels between nodes on a network; user to user, and platform to platform. Mobilizing collective responsibility, the artist engages individual participation within these global and online spaces, lending anyone a stage and a voice to share their experiences endlessly, widely, and informally. Fueling unexpected actions and interactions where the boundaries between performer and audience are blurred by the open and rhizomatic nature of the platform, Bruguera's performance spans across social media, bridging conversations between Instagram and Twitter to implicate an ever-wider audience within image- and text-based actions. With an assigned date, time, and duration, Bruguera’s performance is firmly situated in the real and the live, where a seated audience at the Performa Hub watches her interact digitally and further shifts expectations of what it means to perform online.

Bruguera invites both her audience and social media followers to post personal moments of self-censorship regarding their gender, ethnicity, immigration status, and race, trusting them to keep the project socially-minded, political, and free from personal attacks. These contributors are encouraged to tag their responses @TaniaBruguera in addition to the hashtag #instacitizen, entering into direct dialogue with the artist, fellow contributors, and the audience online. The artist, as well, invites users to log into her own account to post these stories and thoughts, trusting her followers with her private data and transforming herself into a social platform for dialogue and exchange.

Alrrededor de una pasión, Dialogue between a collector and curator.

Commissioner: Alicia Ventura.

56th International Art Exhibition: All the World's Futures

Tania Bruguera will re-create her performance and video installation Untitled (Havana, 2000), which reflects on citizens' intentional "blindness" to the reality of life under Fidel Castro's regime. Through a multi-sensory experience, spectators will discover a reality full of contradictions. (see the Addendum by Okwui Enwezor)

Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America

Contingent Beauty: Contemporary Art from Latin America features a selection of major works by 21 established artists from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela. Encompassing a variety of media including drawing, sculpture, video, and interactive object- and video-based installations, the exhibition highlights contemporary artists who use seductive and engaging materials to convey their social, political, and environmental concerns.

Drawn primarily from the Museum's permanent collection of modern Latin American art-one of the most comprehensive collections of its kind in any public institution-nearly all of the 32 works on view have been acquired by the Museum over the last five years through the Caribbean Art Fund, established in 2010 as a special initiative of the Museum and Fundación Gego. The goal of this fund is to research, promote, and collect the work of artists from the greater Caribbean.

The exhibition also features work by exceptional mid-career Latin American artists, generating a dynamic dialogue that cuts across chronological and geographic borders. Contingent Beauty intertwines aesthetic refinement with biting critiques of timely issues grounded in the complex realities of Latin America and its long history of colonization, political repression, and economic crisis. These issues range from poverty, violence, gender, government corruption, and globalization, to the war on drugs and the legacy of colonialism.

The "beauty" of these works is contingent upon contextual interpretation. Each piece harbors a tension between opposing elements, such as beauty and violence, seduction and repulsion, or elegance and brutality. Among the artists represented are Tania Bruguera (Cuba), María Fernanda Cardoso (Colombia), Los Carpinteros (Cuba), Grupo Mondongo (Argentina), Guillermo Kuitca (Argentina), Miguel Ángel Rojas (Colombia), Javier Téllez (Venezuela), and Tunga (Brazil).

Estadística (Statistics) (1996–2000), by the renowned Cuban artist Tania Bruguera, was produced communally as the artist invited her friends and neighbors to donate and assemble locks of their own hair into a Cuban flag. By echoing women’s collectives who secretly sewed Cuban flags during the Cuban War of Independence, Bruguera’s flag creates an analogous resistance to Fidel Castro’s regime. Similarly, Yoan Capote spent eight years collecting teeth from friends, family members, and acquaintances in Cuba for his work Stress (in memoriam) (2004–12). The piece presents a metaphor for resistance in that a heavy concrete block is precariously balanced on top of rows of these teeth, and rocks back and forth in a grinding motion.

Program in Latin American Studies Lunch Lecture

Following a brief overview of Political Timing Specific, the lecture will focus on Bruguera's latest performance #YoTambienExijo (I Also Demand), where she attempted to put a microphone at Revolution Square, in Havana, open to all, without censorship.

Performance art can be used as a channel to open avenues for freedom among, not only the elite, but the general Cuban population. This is a time where civic education should be at the forefront, giving answers to the intense social transition ahead, helping not only to inform one's rights but how to enact them. This is one of the objectives of The Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artvism, a new space being developed by Bruguera in Havana.

Access VIDEO

Conversation: Tania Bruguera and Dread Scott: "Political Art Is Uncomfortable Knowledge"

For the opening program of the exhibition Agitprop!, we host a conversation between Dread Scott and Tania Bruguera, artists who use their work as a tool for social change. The discussion focuses on the political issues that their art addresses and the strategies they employ to combat the demonization of immigrants, institutionalized oppression, and police brutality. The artists touch on historical precedents of agitprop that influence their work as well as the most urgent issues facing society today. As such, this conversation is an opportunity not only to learn from history, but to see art as a way to fight for a more just future.

Access VIDEO

Women Speaking to Power: Tania Bruguera & Shirin Neshat in Conversation

Event hosted by: SVA's MA Curatorial Practice department

Two of the most significant contemporary artists in the world today will speak with each other about their experiences as citizens and artists whose works consider gender, politics, their respective homelands, Cuba and Iran, and beyond.

ART: Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power.

By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.

She expands the definition and range of performance art, sometimes performing solo but more often staging participatory events and interactions that build on her own observations, experiences, and interpretations of the politics of repression and control.

Bruguera has explored both the promise and failings of the Cuban Revolution in performances that provoke viewers to consider the political realities masked by government propaganda and mass-media interpretation. Advancing the concept of arte útil (literally, useful art; art as a benefit and a tool), she proposes solutions to sociopolitical problems through the implementation of art, and has developed long-term projects that include a community center and a political party for immigrants, and a school for behavior art.