New York Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs – MOIA
During 2016, Tania Bruguera will focus on her work as artist-in-residence of the New York Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and in opening INSTAR – Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, in Havana, Cuba

>  January 2016
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Migrant Manifesto

22.01.2016 – 26.03.2016 Mon – Sat: 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
David Weinberg
300 W. Superior Street, Suite 203. Chicago, United States.

Group exhibition

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Soul Asylum

Featuring works by Tania Bruguera, Jenny Polak, Díaz Lewis, and the Albany Park Theater Project, Soul Asylum gives voice to the immigration justice movement through sound, painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. Each work is inspired by immigrant communities through their stories of struggle and celebrated victories. The artworks in Soul Asylum are participatory and invite the viewer to directly engage with gallery installations and ephemeral performances. With a focus on detention and deportation as it affects citizens and noncitizens alike, Soul Asylum artists work to provide structure and language for communities routinely kept silent by fear. Curated in partnership with Human Rights Watch, the exhibition aims to advance the efforts of grassroots and national organizations to reform immigration policy in the US and to move the conversation to the front lines of civil rights discourse.

Migrant Manifesto

This document was created in collaboration with immigration academics, activists, politicians, and community members at a convening at the IM International headquarters in Corona, Queens on November 4th and 5th.

For more information visit: http://d-weinberg.com/soul-asylum

Notes from the Field: Commoning Practices in Art and Science

28.01.2016 – 19.03.2016 Thu – Sat: 12:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Arts Catalyst Centre for Art, Science & Technology 74-76 Cromer Street, London WC1H 8DR. United Kingdom.
Exhibition

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Arte Útil

Arts Catalyst launches its Centre for Art, Science and Technology with Notes from the Field: Commoning Practices in Art and Science. This multi-faceted project investigates the notion of art as a tool or tactic for action with communities, with a focus on projects involving science and technology or driven by ecological concerns.

Notes from the Field… presents aspects of Arts Catalyst’s ongoing art and citizen science project Wrecked! on the Intertidal Zone with lead artists YoHa, Critical Art Ensemble, Andy Freeman and Fran Gallardo, who are working with communities on the Thames estuary. Alongside this, it presents the Arte Útil archive, a project initiated by artist Tania Bruguera, which chronicles a history of art projects that create tactics to change how we act in society.

In an archive room designed by Collective Works and ConstructLab, housing physical copies of selected Arte Útil case studies, and through exploratory workshops and discussion events, visitors will be able to speak with invited resident guests, undertake their own research, or propose new Arte Útil case studies. Contributing artists, scientists and experts to Notes from the Field… include Alistair Hudson, Dimitri Launder, Lisa Ma, Sylvia Nagl, Graham Harwood and Veronica Ranner.

>  February 2016
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CAA 104th Annual Conference

03.02.2016 / 6:30 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, Washington D.C., United States
Keynote Address

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Aest-ethics: Art with Consequences

Tania Bruguera, a Cuban artist who works in performance, installation, and video, will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at CAA’s 2016 Annual Conference. The title of Bruguera’s talk will be “Aest-ethics: Art with Consequences.” Bruguera’s work on issues of free speech and immigration and her fearlessness to speak out against forces of oppression-many of which she has experienced firsthand in Cuban prisons-is important and undeniably relevant to not just the art and academic worlds, but also the world at large. This summer, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs jointly appointed Bruguera as their first artist-in-residence. The artist was also recently nominated as a finalist for the prestigious 2016 Huge Boss Prize, awarded every two years by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum to an artist who has made a visionary contribution to contemporary art.

/ Freedom of Expression Awards 2016 – Shortlist

09.02.2016

#‎YoTambienExijo shortlisted for the Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Award 2016, in the Arts Category. Congratulations to the team, and a speacil thanks to the super Deborah Bruguera.

ARTS

For artists and arts producers whose work challenges repression and injustice and celebrates artistic free expression.

Tania Bruguera is an American-Cuban artist who was arrested after attempting to stage her performance piece #YoTambienExijo in Havana in late 2014. Mounted soon after the apparent thaw in US-Cuban relations, Bruguera’s piece offered members of the public the chance of one minute of ‘censor-free’ expression in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución.

The banning of the show, and Bruguera’s subsequent detention, caused an international outcry and sparked a worldwide solidarity movement for free expression in Cuba. Leading venues and artists around the world have been re-staging #YoTambienExijo all year, drawing attention to the ongoing persecution of artists in Cuba. Bruguera estimates that over 20,000 Cubans have been involved in the project to date.

“I truly believe that in totalitarian regimes like Cuba, art has the privilege to open doors. It can serve as an escape from fear and from a life of lies.” – Tania Bruguera, founder #YoTambienExijo

 

One minute out of fifty five years – space for freedom of expression in Cuba after restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States

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One minute out of fifty five years – space for freedom of expression in Cuba after restoration of diplomatic relations with the United States

An introduction to the political reconstruction of Cuba, focusing on the current struggle for freedom of expression under the new political and economic circumstances.

Following a brief overview of the history of artistic censorship in Cuba, coming to the conclusion that censorship is not a bureaucratic faux pas but a government strategy to maintain power.

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 to redefine the international image of the Cuban project, in which the importance of civic education, as given by places like the Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artvism, cannot be underestimated. In order to achieve change, one must first lose one’s fear to speak and enact one’s civil rights.

Tania Bruguera “Every Gesture is a Political Act”

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Art and Social Criticism Lecture Series: Tania Bruguera “Every Gesture is a Political Act”

For over 25 years world-renowned artist Tania Bruguera has created socially-engaged performances and installations that examine the nature of political power structures and their effect on the lives of society’s most vulnerable individuals and groups. Her politically provocative works have tackled global issues of power, migration, censorship and repression through participatory works that turn “viewers” into “citizens.” For Bruguera art is a vehicle for questioning privilege and implementing dreams. She writes: “Art becomes political when it achieves actual results.”

Determined to take advantage of President Obama’s Dec. 17th, 2014 momentous announcement that Cuba and the U.S. would resume full relations, Bruguera soon left New York for Cuba. She had planned to restage her work on freedom of speech, Tatlin’s Whisper #5, at Plaza de la Revolución on December 30th, (originally performed in 2009 at the Havana Biennial). What happened next is a lesson in the consequences of this personal risk: her performance led to a series of arrests and detainments, inspiring museums and arts organizations around the world to stage there own versions of this compelling work.

From 2010-2015 Bruguera blurred the line between art and activism through her project Immigrant Movement International, (IMI), a conceptual artwork on immigrant rights which took the form of a community agency providing actual social services to immigrants and other transnational residents in Queens, New York. It was also the headquarters for the art project as global political movement, which was fueled by a global network of immigration rights activists. Bruguera has just begun her tenure as artist in residence for New York City in the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. She lives and works in New York, New Haven and Havana.

Sponsored by:

The Program in American Studies, with co-sponsorship from the Stanford Arts Institute, the Department of Art & Art History, and the Cantor Arts Center.

>  March 2016
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Referendum: Performance by Tania Bruguera

06.03.2016 / 12:00 p.m. – 12:00 a.m.
Performance

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Referendum

Artist Tania Bruguera will revisit her project Referendum, which was first staged in fall 2015 as part of Nuit Blanche in Toronto. The interactive performance functions as a public vote on questions surrounding immigration and borders, generally raising public awareness about the effects of borders on humankind in a time of unprecedented migration.

Referendum is a companion piece to The Francis Effect (2014), a work currently on view in When Artists Speak Truth… that aims to change the perception of immigration and citizenship rights worldwide. Bruguera and her collaborators collected signatures on postcards that featured an image of the seven continents united, accompanied by the slogan “Dignity has no nationality,” which endorse Pope Francis’ supportive stance toward immigrants.

Artist-in-Residence Lecture

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One of the leading political and performance artists of her generation, Bruguera researches ways in which Art can be applied to the everyday political life; focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics.

Recognized as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, she is a 2015 Herb Alpert Award winner, a Hugo Boss Prize finalist, a Yale World Fellow and is the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). In 2013 she was part of the team creating the first document on artistic freedom and cultural rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. Her survey show, the inaugural Neuberger Prize, in 2010 was selected best show at a University Gallery by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). Her work was exhibited at Documenta 11 (Kassel), Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Guggenheim and Van Abbemuseum among others.

Bruguera continues working on the political rights of migrants through her long-term project Immigrant Movement International and in May 2015 opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana.

Talking Shop: Art + Activism by The Contemporary

10.03.2016 / 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Walters Art Museum, 600 N Charles Street. Baltimore, United States.
Conversation

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Art + Activism, moderated by Board Trustee Lionel Foster, will pair artist Tania Bruguera, based in New York, New Haven, and Havana, and Baltimore-based producer and author Eddie Conway.

The panel will explore the ways in which activism manifests through the art, cultural, and political work of two prolific individuals.

Talking Shop, our 2015 Speaker Series, partners acclaimed artists and professionals from various disciplines to discuss the nexus of art, science, medicine, technology, politics, and more. Where are the intersections of these practices? How can society utilize these disciplines in collaboration as catalysts for creative thinking? Each evening will begin with short presentations by the invited participants which will set context for moderated group discussion. Talking Shop is made possible with generous support from The Aaron and Lillie Straus Foundation. This series is free and open to the public. Each panel will begin promptly at 7pm, doors close at 6:45pm.

Tania Bruguera is one of the leading political and performance artists of her generation. Bruguera researches ways in which Art can be applied to the everyday political life; focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics.

Recognized as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award 2016, she is a 2015 Herb Alpert Award winner, a Hugo Boss Prize finalist, a Yale World Fellow and is the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). In 2013 she was part of the team creating the first document on artistic freedom and cultural rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. Her survey show, the inaugural Neuberger Prize, in 2010 was selected best show at a University Gallery by AICA. Her work was exhibited at Documenta 11, Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Guggenheim and Van Abbemuseum among others. Bruguera continues working on the political rights of migrants through her long-term project Immigrant Movement International and in May 2015 opened the Hannah Arendt International Institute for Artivism, in Havana. She lives and works in New York, New Haven and Havana.

Eddie Conway is a former member of the Black Panther Party Baltimore chapter. Wrongfully convicted of murder in 1970, he served nearly forty four years in the Maryland prison system. During his incarceration, he played a leading role in a variety of prisoner support initiatives including, a Prisoner’s Labor Union, a ACLU’s class action lawsuit that reduced the prison population by 700 beds, he implemented dozens of educational programs that connected prisoners with the outside communities and Co-founded the AFSC- Friend of a Friend program, a mentoring project that helps prisoners survive incarceration.

Conway earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Coppin State University and attended graduate studies at California State University-Dominguez Hills. While in prison, Conway authored two books, The Greatest Threat, The Black Panther Party and COINTELPRO (iAMWE 2009) and Marshall Law, The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther (AK Press, 2011). He has been a guest lecturer at universities and colleges across the nation, speaking on the prison industrial complex, the history of the Black Panther Party, and community organizing. In addition, he co-founded the Coalition of Friends, which works in the tradition of the survival programs developed by the Black Panther Party to build stronger communities. Since his release in 2014, Conway has appeared on television and radio programs in the US and South America, and produced television programs for The Real News Network, where he works as an executive producer.
In 2014, Amy Goodman remarked on Democracy Now: “After 44 years behind bars, you would think he would never want to set foot in a prison again. But that is not Eddie Conway. For his future, he says: “I’m going to continue to work with the Friend of a Friend organization. I think we’ve saved a lot of lives. I think we can save a lot more.”

moderated by

Lionel Foster is writer, editor, and the communications manager for the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute. An alumnus of Johns Hopkins University’s Writing Seminars program (B.A.), he earned master’s degrees in Social Policy and Planning and Regional and Urban Planning Studies (London School of Economics) as well as Creative and Life Writing (Goldsmiths College, University of London) during his tenure as a British Marshall Scholar. Foster’s writing has appeared in Baltimore City Paper, The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Grist, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications. For his work in urban communities he was named a Maryland Daily Record VIP.

Tania Bruguera: The Artist as Activist

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Tania Bruguera: The Artist as Activist

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Tania Bruguera creates politically charged works that have led to her detention in her native Cuba. The artist – whose performance pieces and installations have been shown at the Venice Biennial, Tate Modern, and MoMA – speaks with Claire Bishop, GC professor of art history, about the role of activism in her work.

Their talk is the keynote event of a conference inspired by the new edition of Shift: Graduate Journal of Visual and Material Culture. Presented by GC Public Programs, the James Gallery, and the Ph.D. Program in Art History.

The Sosnoff Art Lecture Series 2016

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>  April 2016
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Artists Panel: Re-Imaging Global Intersections

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ARTISTS PANEL: RE-IMAGING GLOBAL INTERSECTIONS

Moderator: María de los Angeles Torres, IUPLR Executive Director, University of Illinois at Chicago

Tania Bruguera, Installation and Performance Artist, New Haven

Felipe Ehrenberg, Visual Artist, Mexico City

María Gaspar, Visual Artist, Chicago

Pablo Helguera, Multidisciplinary Artist, New York

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Visual Artist, Chicago

Antonio Martorell, Visual Artist, San Juan

Conference Theme

The Latino Art Now! Nuestra América: Re-imaging Global Intersections Conference in Chicago will continue to examine US-based Latino art production, including new perspectives on the transnational and global contexts of many Latino artists.

Renewed visibility for artists in a wave of major exhibitions at national museums and galleries, the expansion of curatorial and academic infrastructure, and new publication and research initiatives tend to signal wider and expanding opportunities. Can we at the present moment map Latino art activity within a larger transnational, hemispheric, and global context and discourse? The 2016 LAN! Conference will explore the following topics:

Artivisms/Social Practice Art

The City as Site and Source

Outside the White Cube: Digital Interventions

Queer Geographies of Latino Art

Intersections: Latino/Latin American

Comparative Art Histories

Curatorial Negotiations: Authority and Display

Recalibrating Framework and Canon

Art from Emergent Latino Groups

Public/Private Collecting and Collections

Global Networks and Intersections

Latino Futurisms

Recovering Early Artists and Legacies

Reassessing Design and Architecture

Latino Art Market

Art as an Economic Stimulus

Defying Categories

Queens Museum Gala

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Evening honoring artists Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Tania Bruguera, featuring a live performance by K-pop band EXP presented by I’m Making a Boy Band (Bora Kim, Karin Kuroda and Samantha Shao) and a paddle raise in support museum programs.

Reporting in Times of Crisis: Telling Migrant Tales through Creative Storytelling

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Reporting in Times of Crisis: Telling Migrants Tales through Creative Storytelling

In the wake of the migration crisis and a string of violent events across the world, some communities have fallen victims to hostility. The rising far right in several European countries, and anti-Islam messages by some politicians in the United States are just a few examples of this phenomenon. Extreme voices have increasingly been striking a chord with citizens by voicing fears that alien communities are threatening their cultures and economies.

Too often, in times of crisis – terrorist attacks, migration crisis – the media tend to mix together important terms and concepts, such as extremists and Muslims, immigrants and refugees, etc. Those amalgams, along with sensationalist images, alarmist headlines and commentary, have contributed to feed people’s anxieties.

A number of international organizations, politicians and media organizations have called for the need to build a “counter narrative” in order to combat and counter hateful and extremist messages that are sent around against certain communities. For journalists, formulating and communicating effective counter-narratives consists in debunking certain myths, and responding to misrepresentations of facts. But beyond doing accurate reporting and careful research, it is sometimes unclear how impactful this media counter narrative can be against hateful propaganda.

The breakout session on Media and Migration during the 7th Global Forum of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations in Baku, Azerbaijan, will look at various creative initiatives that are used to efficiently combat extremist and hateful language. At a time when journalists have to constantly reinvent themselves and find new ways to create appealing content, this session will discuss the value of transversal and multidisciplinary approaches in order to build strong counter narratives that can reach a large number of people.

Questions for discussion:

– What are recent examples of amalgams in the media about certain communities? How should we analyze them? What do they tell us about the current state of the media?

– What are innovative ways of countering hateful and inaccurate narratives?

– How can the media help avoid amalgams?

– How can the media contribute to foster inclusive societies?

– What are creative ways to build an impactful counter narrative?

Speakers:

– Ms. Vania Andre, Editor in Chief, The Haitian Times (moderator)

– Ms. Tania Bruguera, Installation and Performance Artist, Cuba

– Ms. Claudia Nunez, Digital Director, Los Angeles Times en Español; Founder, Migrahack, Institute for Justice & Journalism

– Mr. David Mason, Director, “Cast From the Storm”, Australia

– Ms. Christina Elizabeth Rodriguez, Co-Founder, EXPO Collective

– Mr. Colin Boyd Shafer, Documentary Photographer, Cosmopolis Toronto, Canada

– Mr. Jose Antonio Vargas (via video conference) Founder, #EmergingUS

>  May 2016
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On Curating 2: Paradigm Shifts, Book Launch and Panel

06.05.2016 / 7:00 p.m.
Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue. New York, United States
Panel and Book Launch

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Americas Society’s Visual Arts Program presents On Curating II, a book of interviews with international curators who program exhibitions in cities such as Bogotá, Dakar, Havana, Jakarta, Jerusalem, Lagos, Mumbai, Seoul, and Zagreb. Author Carolee Thea explores the lively system of art biennials thriving around the world-particularly outside Europe and the United States. In this event, Thea speaks with artist Tania Bruguera and curators Steven Henry Madoff (Chair, MA Curatorial Practice SVA), Alexandra Munroe (Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art and the Senior Advisor of Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation), and Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi (Curator of African Art at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College).

In collaboration with ARTBOOK | D.A.P.

Tania Bruguera is a Cuban installation and performance artist. She is currently the inaugural artist-in-residence for the City of New York’s Mayor’s office of Immigrant Affairs. Her awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Arts, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Steven Henry Madoff is a curator, art critic, and poet. He is currently the chair of the Master on Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City.

Alexandra Munroe is the Samsung Senior Curator of Asian Art and the Senior Advisor of Global Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation.

Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi was born in Nigeria and co-curated the Dak’Art Biennial in 2014. He is the Curator of African Art at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Nzewi was interviewed in On Curating 2: Paradigm Shifts.

Carolee Thea has become a voice on international curatorial practice. Since 1996, she has authored three books which feature conversations with a selection of the most important biennial curators. Her latest publication is On Curating 2: Paradigm Shifts (2016). Thea has been a contributing editor at Sculpture magazine since 1996, and has written numerous articles for other publications. Thea lives and works in New York City.

Artist Talk: Tania Bruguera

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In conjunction with “False Flags,” Pelican Bomb presents a lecture by internationally renowned artist Tania Bruguera.

Pelican Bomb, in partnership with the Newcomb Art Museum and the Cuban & Caribbean Studies Institute at Tulane University, hosts a talk with internationally renowned artist Tania Bruguera.

For this lecture, Bruguera speaks about her politically motivated practice, including #YoTambienExijo (I Also Demand), where she attempted to put a microphone at Revolution Square in Havana in 2014. She had invited people to express their visions for Cuba without censorship, but, before this performance, she was detained and had her passport confiscated by the Cuban government. One of the leading political and performance artists of her generation, Bruguera researches ways in which art can be applied to everyday life. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education, and politics. Continuing her focus on the promise and failure of the Cuban Revolution, Bruguera will open INSTAR, the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt, in Havana in September 2016. A residency, think tank, and workshop space, INSTAR aims to use performance art as a channel to open avenues for freedom among the general Cuban population.

Recognized as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine and shortlisted for the 2016 #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award, Bruguera is a 2015 Herb Alpert Award winner, a Hugo Boss Prize finalist, a Yale World Fellow, and the first artist in residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs. In 2013, she was part of the team creating the first document on artistic freedom and cultural rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta, the Venice Biennale, the Tate Modern in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, among others. She lives and works between New York and Havana.

Her work The Francis Effect is currently on view in New Orleans as part of “False Flags,” a group exhibition curated by Noah Simblist, at Pelican Bomb Gallery X (1612 Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard). First presented in 2014 at the Guggenheim, the performance exists in the guise of a political campaign that requests the Pope grant Vatican citizenship to all immigrants and refugees around the world.

Migrant Manifesto

14.05.2016 – 12.06.2016 / Tuesday – Sunday, 12:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Studio 1 & MOMENTUM Gallery, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Mariannenplatz 2. Berlin, Germany.
Exhibition

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HERO MOTHER: Contemporary Art by Post-Communist Women, Rethinking Heroism

Curated by Bojana Pejić& Rachel Rits-Volloch. Curatorial Advisor: David Elliott.

HERO MOTHER presents 30 women artists from 20 countries with communist legacies whose work addresses and defies the frighteningly regressive political agendas in many Eastern European countries today, outing it in the context of broader developments worldwide. The exhibition and the discursive program focus on the role of gender, citizenship, nationalism, migration and personal freedom, as well as the relation between artists and institutions such as state structures. Looking beyond feminist and queer critiques HERO MOTHER addresses how contemporary art can act as a mirror to a world turned on its head, and specifically how humor, farce, and parody can form the strongest tools of social engagement and change.

Commencement Ceremony 2016 – SAIC

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Access speech: PDF ENGLISH / PDF ESPAÑOL

Access Introductory Remarks, by Prof Rachel Weiss: PDF

Tania Bruguera: Commencement Speaker

A leading performance artist, Tania Bruguera (MFA 2001) researches relationships between art and politics, specifically transformations of social affect into political effectiveness and institutional structures of collective memory, education, and politics, and some of her performances interrogate the Cuban Revolution’s failed promises and evoke the realities masked by propaganda and mass-media interpretation. One of Foreign Policy magazine’s “100 Leading Global Thinkers,” and shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award 2016, she won the 2015 Herb Alpert Award, served as a Yale World Fellow, and inaugurated the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs’ artist-in-residence program. Bruguera also helped create the first document on cultural freedom and rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. In 2010 she was the first recipient of the Roy R. Neuberger Exhibition Prize for emerging artists. After the Cuban government detained Bruguera and confiscated her passport as she attempted a public performance, she opened Havana’s Hannah Arendt International Institute of Artivism. She lives and works in New York, New Haven, Connecticut, and Havana, Cuba.

>  June 2016
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Lynn Hershman Leeson: Rough cut clips of “Tania Bruguera – A State of Vulnerability”

08.06.2016 / 6:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Starr Cinema, Tate Modern. London, United Kingdom.
Film screening. Q&A with director.

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Lynn Hershman Leeson presents a rough cut of her upcoming documentary on Cuban artist Tania Bruguera

In December 2014, two weeks after President Obama’s announcement of the United States’ restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, Tania Bruguera announced her intention to restage her 2009 performance Tatlin’s Whisper #6 in Havana’s Plaza of the Revolution. Providing an open, uncensored platform for citizens to publicly express their views for a span of one minute, the performance was reconceived under the project title #YoTambienExijo (I Also Demand). Bruguera’s efforts to realise the project were criticised by both the police and Cuba’s National Council of the Fine Arts, and she was arrested before the performance could take place. After three consecutive detentions, Bruguera was held under house arrest without charges and her passport revoked for a period of eight months. Voices from the art world and beyond rallied to support her and the project throughout this period, during which many urgent discussions on censorship took shape.

Documenting the personal and emotional fallout of Bruguera’s unjust detentions, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Tania Bruguera – A State of Vulnerability observes the artist’s sessions with psychiatrist Dr Frank Ochberg, one of the founding fathers of modern psycho-traumatology who helped first define Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. An intimate and profound discussion of family disorders and cultural trauma emerges as the film touches on the various ways in which censorship of both the family and society have come to shape Bruguera’s aesthetic. Picking up threads from both the surreal injustices portrayed in Hershman Leeson’s 2008 feature Strange Culture and her conversations with politically and socially-engaged artists in the more recent film ! Women Art Revolution, this new documentary registers a powerful dialogue between artists that underscores the importance of film as an empathic medium.

Rough cut clips of Tania Bruguera – A State of VulnerabilityUSA 2016, digital file, colour, sound, 73 min.

The screening is followed by a discussion and Q&A with Hershman Leeson.

Director bio:

Lynn Hershman Leeson (born 1941, United States) is an artist and filmmaker. Over the last four decades, her work has been widely celebrated for its critical explorations of identity and proxies, privacy and surveillance, the interfacing of humans and machines and the relationship between real and virtual worlds. Her pioneering work developing the alter ego Roberta Breitmore (1974–8), interactive projects LORNA (1979–84) and Deep Contact (1984–9), artificial intelligence projectsCybeRoberta (1995–2000), Agent Ruby (2001–present) and the recent experiment in genetic engineering Infinity Engine (2013–present) have challenged and expanded the fields of performance, installation and new media.

Hershman Leeson has also written, directed, edited and produced five previous feature films, including ! Women Art Revolution 2011, a look at how the American Feminist Art Movement has transformed art and culture, and Strange Culture 2008, Teknolust 2002 and Conceiving Ada 1997, three films in which she worked with actor Tilda Swinton. Hershman Leeson’s work has been acquired by numerous public collections and was the subject of two recent retrospectives.

This presentation of Hershman Leeson’s work in progress forms part of an ongoing dialogue between Tania Bruguera and Tate, following on from #YoTambienExijo: A Restaging of Tatlin’s Whisper #6in April 2015. The screening of Hershman Leeson’s film precedes the forthcoming display of Tania Bruguera’s action Tatlin’s Whisper #5 2008 acquired by Tate in 2009. Two mounted police patrol the museum space, guiding and controlling the audience using crowd control techniques that are familiar to anyone who has attended a political demonstration.  The work will be activated intermittently between 17 June and 3 July to coincide with the opening of the new Tate Modern.  

Desengaño – Visual explanantion, 2010 (Video)

09.06.2016 – 09.10.2016 / Tue-Sat: 10:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m. / Sun: 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.
Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno – CAAM. Los Balcones, 11. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
Exhibition

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Kaleidoscope And Puzzles
in the MUSAC Latin American Collection

In Crimen perfecto, the Uruguayan artist Luis Camnitzer invites the observer to look at a series of works of art through ten teleidoscopes (kaleidoscopes with a lens at the end that deforms reality) placed at different points of the exhibition room.

The work observed is reduced to a formalist decoration, “annihilating” its meaning. At the same time, the order in which the curator, as the person responsible for the” scientific nature of the exhibition” is upset, which questions his “unique” thought. In this way Crimen perfecto alludes significantly to the claim that the art historian, Didi-Huberman, has been making for a dialectic understanding provided by the figure of the kaleidoscope, approached in a revealing manner in his work “Caleidoscopio y rompecabezas: el tiempo se lanza como un bretzel…”.

Based on the ideas presented in this essay and on the subversive and “destructive” effect of Crimen perfecto, the present exhibition brings together a selection of works by Latin American artists, works that belong to the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, and are outstanding due to their profound spirit that is critical and reflexive, directed to the reordering of the established systems in order to dismantle and look for new ones. They stand out for their great interest in language as a vehicle for the construction of meaning.

The works on show explore themes which are part of the poetry of the MUSAC collection such as the memory, the body, the identity, the urban environment and popular iconography. Most of them were created between 2001 and 2014, by artists from countries such as Colombia, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Peru, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico amongst others. They reveal realities and conflicts of a political, social, economic, cultural and existential nature, relating individual concerns and/or associated to specific contexts with questions and matters of urgency of a universal character.

Classified in four fundamental subject sections: sociopolitical contexts, landscapes/territory, body/individual/ citizenship and art/language/institution, the aim of the exhibition is to establish new approaches to the works with the idea of rethinking our present times.

Crimen perfecto and the theoretical model to which it refers, would serve as a necessary “hindrance” as regards the order of the exhibition itself, thus establishing clear connections between the works and the subject sections. These ten teleidoscopes placed in the different rooms that make up the itinerary through the exhibition, in line with the idea of breaking down stereotypes into which the works could fall or the idea itself of “exhibition”, will create new dimensions as regards the meanings they transmit, calling on the active participation of the observer and the multiple effects and possible viewings of the Collection, which are always infinite.

Wendy Navarro, Curator.

Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version), 2009.

10.06.2016 – 04.09.2016 / Tue-Sun: 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. / Wed: 11:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.
South London Gallery. 65-67 Peckham Road, London, United Kingdom.
Exhibition – Video.

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The South London Gallery presents Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, the second exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative.

Curated by Pablo León de la Barra, Guggenheim UBS MAP Curator, Latin America, in collaboration with the South London Gallery, the exhibition highlights recently acquired works by more than 20 artists working with mediums and methods including installation, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, and video.

Participating artists include: Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Carlos Amorales, Alexander Apóstol, Tania Bruguera, Luis Camnitzer, Mariana Castillo Deball, Alejandro Cesarco, Raimond Chaves & Gilda Mantilla, Donna Conlon & Jonathan Harker, Adriano Costa, Eduardo Costa, Minerva Cuevas, Jonathas de Andrade, Wilson Díaz, Rafael Ferrer, Regina José Galindo, Mario García Torres, Tamar Guimarães, Federico Herrero, Alfredo Jaar, Claudia Joskowicz, Runo Lagomarsino, David Lamelas & Hildegarde Duane, Marta Minujín, Carlos Motta, Iván Navarro, Rivane Neuenschwander, Gabriel Orozco, Damián Ortega, Amalia Pica, Wilfredo Prieto, Paul Ramírez Jonas, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Gabriel Sierra, Javier Téllez, Erika Verzutti, Carla Zaccagnini.

With a focus on work made by artists born after 1968, in addition to several early pioneers who were active internationally in the 1960s and ’70s, Under the Same Sun at the South London Gallery examines a diversity of creative responses by artists to complex, shared realities that have been influenced by colonial and modern histories, repressive governments, economic crises, and social inequality, as well as by concurrent periods of regional economic wealth, development, and progress.

The SLG is the final venue on the exhibition’s international tour, following the Guggenheim Museum, New York in June 2014 and the Museo Jumex, Mexico City in November 2015.

As part of the exhibition programme Federico Herrero and Tania Bruguera will run residencies at the South London Gallery.

Tatlin’s Whisper #5

17.06.2016 – 03.07.2016 / Unannounced
Turbine Hall, Tate Modern. Bankside, London, UK.
Performance

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Two mounted police officers patrol the museum space, guiding and controlling the audience

In Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5 two police officers use crowd control techniques that are familiar to anyone who has attended a pop concert, football match or political demonstration.

The performance might include: closing off the gallery entrance or entrances; manipulating the audience into a single group and encircling it to tighten the group; frontal confrontation with the horse; and breaking up the audience into two distinct groups.

The performance happens unannounced.

This event is part of the opening weekend for the new Tate Modern.

The Office of Useful Art

19/06.2016 / Tue, Wed, Fri, Sat: 10:00 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. / Thu: 10:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. / Sun: 12:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
MIMA – Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Centre Square. Middlesbrough, UK
Arte Útil

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‘Arte Útil’ roughly translates as ‘useful art’. This type of practice focuses on the applied dimension of art, stressing the beneficial outcomes of projects for their users. The archive of Arte Útil presents case studies that reintroduce the old idea that art is not for its own sake, but a tool or device for social change.

The Arte Útil archive

This is not an exhibition but a working space open to the public, where we invite contributions to the archive, subscription to the membership of the Arte Útil association and proposals for projects that it can address. You are invited to participate in this working space, with opportunities to make, create and share your ideas of what useful art means to you.

Developed in collaboration with artist Tania Bruguera, the Van Abbemuseum and the Internationale confederation of European museums as part of the Uses of Art programme funded by the European Culturefund and Arts Council England.

Evento Agua

24.06.2016 – 31.10.2016 / Thu-Mon: 12:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. / Wed: 12:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Malba, Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires
Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Performance

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Yoko Ono – Dream Come True

Curators: Gunnar B. Kvaran and Agustín Pérez Rubio

Water Event

Water is a recurring motif in the work of Yoko Ono, and provides many metaphoric layers: the water is the main component of the human body. Buddhist philosophy compares human life with water and the human body with a container. In 1971, Ono invited a group of artists to participate in a water event, held at the Everson Museum in Syracuse. Her intention was to create collaborative works based on the water and their meanings.

Under Dream Come True, Ono convened a group of Latin American artists — Liliana Porter, Hernán Marina, Ana Gallardo, Amalia Pica, Rosângela Rennó, Runo Lagomarsino, Alexander Apóstol, Alfredo Jaar, Tania Bruguera, Teresa Margolles, Tercerunquinto, Antonio Caro — with the idea of producing a work-container able to “bring water” to people either to heal minds or to recognize their courage to protest. It can also be used specifically to a person, people or region that desperately needs water. Each work will be exhibited in the museum as part of the exhibition.

Broadcasting the Archive #6

25.06.2016 – 26.06.2016 / 10:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. (on June 26)

MACBA – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Plaça dels Àngels, 08001 Barcelona, Spain.

Arte Útil – Tour, discussion and conversations with AU artists

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Broadcasting the archive #6 – Barcelona

Broadcasting the archive is a project aiming at emancipate the usership around the Arte Útil archive. The project re-activates and mediates the archive within and beyond the museum’s context, developing a year touring programme of workshops and discussions hosted by different organisations worldwide.

Archive cards, sound and video documents, interviews, guided tours through some projects, production of public events, activities, workshops, seminars and conferences will be the materials to activate and spread the archive. Broadcasting the archive will break the physical walls of the institution through a call for action, becoming a source of inspiration both for a specialized public as well as a non-trained contemporary art audience.

On Saturday 25th at 10:00 am Avalancha collective will led a tour of Raval neighbourhood followed by a discussion at MACBA at 15:30 pm involving some local constituencies as well as international guests.

On Sunday 26th June at 11:00 am at MACBA there will be a series of Skype chats with some artist involved in the Arte Útil archive discussing some case studies related to gentrification, the use of public space as a common good and the Arte Útil Criteria. Confirmed guests: The Umbrella, Núria Güell (Skype), Ruben Santiago, Valentina Maini (Skype).

The event is FREE, we will meet in front of MACBA for the tour on Saturday.

Broadcasting the archive is an independent project conceived by Gemma Medina Estupiñán and Alessandra Saviotti and supported by the Mondriaan Fund and the Art of Impact, to emancipate the usership around the Arte Útil archive. www.arte-util.org

>  July 2016
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Sin ttulo, 1994 Acrlico, carboncillo y cera sobre papel, 53 x 75 cm.

02.07.2016 – 02.10.2016 / Tue – Sat: 10: a.m. – 8:00 p.m. / Sun: 10 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Es Baluard, Plaça Porta de Santa Catalina Nº 10. Palma, Spain.
Exhibition

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Sin ttulo, 1994

(Acrlico, carboncillo y cera sobre papel, 53 x 75 cm.)

Curated by Nekane Aramburu, director of Es Baluard

With the collaboration of Gerardo Mosquera

“The agony and the ecstasy” is an exhibition project that demonstrates the evolution of contemporary Latin American creation through its presence in the art collections of Mallorca. The genealogy that inserts its roots between conflict and aesthetics, the socio-political commitment and the evolution of thought-aesthetics in a remote geographical area but one which is, in spite of everything, connected to the way of understanding the fractures of post-modernity.

Letter-piece: The effort to normalize censorship in Cuba.

05.07.2016 – 12.09.2016 / Tue, Wed, Fri, Sat, Sun: 9:30 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. / Thu: 9:30 a.m. – 10:30 p.m.
PAC: Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Via Palestro, 14. Milan, Italy.
Exhibition

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This letter-piece was also published on INSTAR: artivismo.org/blog

CUBA. Tatuare la storia

Curated by Diego Sileo and Giacomo Zaza

The PAC in Milan explores foreign cultures through contemporary art, drawing for the 2016 a guideline on Cuban art, both inside and outside the island, incorporating artists from different generations active from the 1970s onwards.

TATUAR LA HISTORIA (Tattooing History) means leaving a mark on a shared identity of Cuba, the metaphor itself for the meeting of cultures flowing into a Creole and tropical horizon, a “mirage” of an utopian but intrinsically contradictory world.

Each artist at the PAC exhibition will be a part of the journey towards Cuba, with its magnificence and its difficulties, its sound and furore, its cultural, linguistic and mythical issues, its ideological differences.

Starting from the historical performative nature of contemporary Cuban art, the exhibition will present a large selection of works and installations – some of them conceived for the PAC – of the most representative Cuban artists and the most up-and-coming artists of the new generation, a section dedicated to Lázaro Saavedra (National Prize of Plastic Arts 2014) and a tribute to the two most influential Cuban artists, Ana Mendieta and Félix González-Torres. The exhibition will extend into MUDEC, the Museum of Cultures in Milan, with a site-specific installation by the artist Eduardo Ponjuán (National Prize of Plastic Arts 2013).

La Mano Inmigrante (The Immigrant Hand), Tania Bruguera and Mujeres en Movimiento

15 + 16 + 19.07.2016 / 7:00 p.m. (on 15 + 19 July) / 2:00 p.m. (on 16 July)
46th Ave and 111th Street, Queens. NY, United States.
Performance – Participatory Walk

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LA MANO INMIGRANTE (THE IMMIGRANT HAND) / Tania Bruguera and Mujeres en Movimiento

Cross the border into Corona and join Tania Bruguera and Mujeres en Movimiento on a walk that presents the unacknowledged truth: we are all immigrants. On “La Mano Imigrante,” the group will imagine a neighborhood where everyone’s work and experiences are celebrated. We will re-name subway stops, pass along our life stories and perform the labor of people who, often underpaid and exploited, do the essential jobs that keep this city afloat.

Featuring the following members of Mujeres en Movimiento: Maria Canela, Vero Ramirez and Valeria Reyes

This walk holds 12 people and will be held in Spanish with English translation.

Special thanks: Carla Kasumi

Under the Same Sun: Artist Residencies

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For her first residency in the UK in more than 20 years, Cuban artist Tania Bruguera will further develop her research project Immigrant Movement International (IMI) through a series of think-tank sessions co-hosted by sociologist Saskia Sassen, culminating in a public talk and accompanying publication.

The residencies run as part of Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, the second exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative.

The Francis Effect

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#LondonIsOpen

#LondonIsOpen artwork will be displayed in all 270 stations across the London Underground network.

Launched in 2000 to promote greater understanding of the Tube as a cultural and social environment, Art on the Underground’s mission is to work with leading artists to create extraordinary projects across Transport for London, enriching customers’ journeys today and for the future. AOTU works with artists on a huge range of projects – video and sound pieces, live performances, sculpture, posters, prints and permanent installations. Permanent works by leading artists including Knut Henrik Henrikson, Jacqueline Poncelet, John Maine and Daniel Buren have transformed Tube travellers’ experiences of King’s Cross, Edgware Road, Green Park and Tottenham Court Road stations.

The Mayor’s #LondonIsOpen campaign, launched on 18th July, aims to show the world that London remains entrepreneurial, international, and full of creativity and possibility, while reassuring the more than one million foreign nationals who live in London that they will always be welcome, and that any form of discrimination will not be tolerated.

>  August 2016
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What is art for?

13.08.2016 – 14.08.2016 / Times listed below
Zentrum Paul Klee, Monument im Fruchtland 3. Bern, Switzerland.
Lecture

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“What is art for?”

Session 1/3 – Saturday, August 13: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Session 2/3 – Sunday, August 14: 12:00 – 1:00 p.m.

Session 3/3 – Sunday, August 14: 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Speakers Sommerakademie 2016

Guest Curator Thomas Hirschhorn selected the following international Speakers to be present the entire Academy and to participate the Academy Programme with one or more contributuions each day:

Tania Bruguera, Havanna, New York

Yasmil Raymond, New York

Marcus Steinweg, Berlin

Tania Bruguera & Saskia Sassen: In conversation

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TANIA BRUGUERA & SASKIA SASSEN: IN CONVERSATION

Tania Bruguera in conversation with sociologist Saskia Sassen to reflect upon Bruguera’s ongoing research project Immigrant Movement International (IMI) in the context of her residency at the South London Gallery. IMI is an ongoing, artist-initiated, socio-political movement that aims to engage different communities in order to examine growing concerns about the political representation and conditions facing immigrants.

This public talk brings together one of Cuba’s most outspoken artist-activists and the pre-eminent scholar of urban migration to address issues of power, protest, and the global street.

The event is organised in collaboration with Theatrum Mundi and LSE Cities as part of Theatrum Mundi’s Designing Politics project.

Tania Bruguera’s talk and residency are part of the current exhibition Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today the second exhibition of the Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative. With thanks to Latin Elephant for their community outreach.

A Fair Land Artist Talk: Tania Bruguera

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A Fair Land Artist Talk: Tania Bruguera

A Fair Land: Reinvent/Discuss/Debate
This talk is part of a series of daily talks by project participants and invited speakers, that is intended to prompt discussion about the function of creativity in our lives, alternative perspectives on living, and the elemental things we need in our individual lives. #AFairLand

Tania Brugera is one of the international artists visiting Dublin as part of A Fair Landproject. To mark this rare occasion Brugera will give a talk about her practice with Adam Sutherland (Director Grizedale Arts) at IMMA and together they will reflected on their ideas on the usefulness of art in society.

This talk draws on Brugueras consistent exploration of 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 util (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 behaviour art. Bruguera created the Arte Util Association in January 2011 to provide a platform to meet, exchange ideas, and share strategies on how to deal with the issues of implementing the merger of art into society.

Presented in partnership with CREATE, the National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts. This is a free but ticketed event as places are strictly limited.

Further Information

Tania Bruguera

Tania Bruguera is an artist who researches ways in which art can be applied to the everyday political life; focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. She participated in the Documenta 11 exhibition and also established the Arte de Conducta (Behavior Art) program at Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana. Her work has been shown in the 2015 Venice Biennale, at Tate Modern, London, Guggenheim and MoMA, New York, among others.In May 2015, she opened the Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt in Havana. Tania is currently the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). She lives and works in New York and Havana.  

Adam Sutherland 

Adam Sutherland is currently the director of Grizedale Arts a public art agency in the Lake District of England. Trained as an artist with an early career being principally working with communities and collectives before moving into more formally constituted organisations as creative and executive director his work has always been centred on the use of creativity in everyday life, problem solving and enhancement of the day to day. This notion underpins a belief in personal and community self-determination and the creative impulse as a way to negotiate a better way to live. Grizedale arts is a commissioning and residency centred organisation remotely and rurally located on a productive small holding, the organisation works as a collective on very local programme of everyday activities principally in the local community and the village hall complex they have been instrumental in renewing. The organisation also works on international projects in the art world bringing the village community into an exchange that revitalises both the function of art and the role of the artist. Website http://www.grizedale.org/

>  September 2016
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Opening Session of the foundational process of INSTAR – Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt (May 20 – May 24, 2015) – video documentation

09.09.2016 – 31.12.2016 / Tue-Sun: 11:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m.
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Witte de Withstraat 50. Rotterdam, Netherlands
Ehibition

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In the Belly of the Whale

-Participants

Advancing American Art (1946-47), Minia Biabiany, Broomberg & Chanarin, Tania Bruguera, Mariana Castillo Deball, Jean Martin Charcot, Paul Ekman, Hamza Halloubi, Emily Jacir, Käthe Kollwitz, Susanne Kriemann, Britta Marakatt Labba, Pratchaya Phinthong, Jeremy Shaw, Amie Siegel, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson, Van Abbemuseum

-Curators

Natasha Hoare, Adam Kleinman

Drawing from the story of Jonah and the whale — in which the prophet’s resolve is galvanized while meditating within the belly of the great beast that swallowed him whole — this group exhibition focuses on what it means to be immersed within social histories, and how objects and persons can be transformed through mental and spiritual rumination on context and inscription.

Foregrounding projection, reception, and provenance, artworks, artifacts, and their passage through time and narrative discourses are played off the figure of the cloud chamber—an early twentieth-century device that used water vapor to trace the movement of subatomic particles, laying the ground for the study of particle physics by photographing the patterns these movements produced. Alluding to the cloud chamber’s ability to trace movement and transformation, the works exhibited are ‘objects’ caught in motion, images whose trajectories operate to articulate power structures, official histories and legacies, and other forms of often hidden epistemological acts of violence.

Like fragments or links in a larger system, the collected works here offer perspectives with which to bounce aesthetic concerns against the social environment in which they were birthed or later received. Several works question how artifacts reflect their settings by asking how an object is altered through its changing contexts of display, while others query how an object can alternatively affect reality itself. Eschewing a neat synthesis, this exhibition instead parallels the sense of investigation from within.

Throughout the Fall of 2016, Witte de With invites several guests to give readings into the methodologies and choices on display.

Manifesto on Artists’ Rights, 2012

14.09.2016 – 29.10.2016 / Mon-Sat: 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.
Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden Street. Cambridge, United States.
Exhibition

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The Art of Discovery

A Multidisciplinary Group Exhibition of 2016-2017 Radcliffe Institute Fellows

At the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, art is integrated with other forms of study, and embedded deep in our programming. Each year, fellows pursue individual projects in a community dedicated to inquiry across the arts, sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The Art of Discovery introduces viewers to the bold work of members of our 2016–2017 cohort of fellows, which transcends the fault lines of standard academic disciplines to explore complex topics, and reveal new insights about their own fields of study.

Visitors will encounter an artist manifesto delivered to the United Nations by performance artist Tania Bruguera, fences sculpted by visual artist A.K. Burns, and video by the filmmaker Lamia Joreige. The multidisciplinary exhibition will also feature images of the Milky Way and black holes, visualizations of mathematical probability rendered in everyday shapes, poems in which death and pop culture intersect, and colorful structures of bone cells.

Fellows whose work appears in the exhibition include:

Amahl Bishara, Anthropology
Alexei Borodin, Mathematics and Applied Sciences
Chris Bowler, Biology
Tania Bruguera, Visual Arts
A.K. Burns, Visual Arts 
Gidon Eshel, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Alyssa A. Goodman, Physics
Lamia Joreige, Visual Arts
Kathleen Ossip, Poetry
Dimitrios Psaltis, Astronomy
Adam Tanaka, Urban Planning
Conevery Bolton Valencius, History
Hala Zreiqat, Material Science

Aesth-ethics: The Role of Ethics in Political Art

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Aesth-ethics: The Role of Ethics in Political Art

Part of the 2016-2017 Fellows’ Presentation Series as Tania Bruguera starts her fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute.

Free and open to the public.

Immigration, Racism, and the Changing Face of the Nation

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CONSTITUTION DAY 2016

Art has long been a method of expression, and artists throughout history have been instigators of change-engaging society in conversation about pressing issues. Established in 2005, Constitution Day continues the College’s tradition of leadership in raising and exploring important political issues.

E.J. Dionne, Washington Post columnist and National Public Radio commentator, will headline Constitution Day, a free annual symposium co-sponsored by MICA and the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland.

The panel, moderated by WYPR’s Maryland Morning host Tom Hall, will also include Tania Bruguera, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship winner and performance artist, and Marielena Hincapié, director of the National Immigration Law Center.

The 2016 symposium explores immigration, racism and the impact of changing demographics on public discourse about what it means to be an American. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, racial minority groups will make up the majority of the nation’s population by 2042, but as the country becomes more racially diverse, a portion of the nation’s current majority white population has reacted with fear, and negative language and actions. With recent examples of xenophobic and racist speech used by major political candidates and officeholders in the United States and even abroad, and subsequent protests and divisive dialogue, panelists will discuss the changing face of the country and the issues motivating passion and divisiveness surrounding the issue. Immigration could well prove the deciding factor in the upcoming presidential election.

“This is clearly a crucial topic, which dominates the current political discourse and is giving rise to some really ugly comments from the public and those who want to serve the highest office,” said Constitution Day organizer and MICA Humanistic Studies Department faculty member Firmin DeBrabander. He added, “We need to clear about what’s going on here, why the ugliness, what fears people have, and what are the larger and contextual motivators of this divisive debate.”

/ Immigrant Movement International included in the list of 25 most significant artworks

 
From: Various authors. “25 Artworks,” Frieze, Issue 181, September 2016. (illust.) pp. 116-131.

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FRIEZE MAGAZINE

Issue 181, September 2016

The September issue of frieze celebrates the magazine’s 25th anniversary with three exclusively commissioned covers by internationally celebrated artist Sara Cwynar, Rosemarie Trockel and Chris Ofili.

The issue also features our selection of the 25 most influential artworks of the last 25 years, including works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wolfgang Tillmans and Kara Walker, interviews with critics Li Xianting and Hal Foster, a roundtable with artists Carlos Motta, Mario Garcia Torres and Fernanda Brenner and a special artist’s project by Gary Panter.

The uses of art — Art as a tool

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IDEAS CITY Athens, in partnership with NEON Foundation

September 19–25, 2016

IDEAS CITY Athens is conceived in partnership with NEON Foundation, a nonproit group devoted to broadening the appreciation, understanding, and creation of contemporary art in Greece. Like IDEAS CITY Detroit, the Athens program will be organized around a global studio laboratory—a  five-day series of workshops, site visits, lectures, and discussions with local experts, including artists, designers, policymakers, and community members—followed by a public presentation and a conference. Participants in the laboratory will be selected through an open call process and will work together to develop ideas and strategies that respond to the challenges facing the city of Athens.

IDEAS CITY Detroit and IDEAS CITY Athens will bring together researchers, artists, and designers in intensive studio laboratory environments to develop ideas and strategies in response to the urgent challenges facing each of these urban centers. Both cities represent something of a paradox in that they each embody a specific condition of exacerbated urban crisis: Detroit is a city emerging from recent bankruptcy while struggling with widespread decay and social inequality, and Athens is the capital of a nation ravaged by economic depression and strained by a massive in ow of refugees. Yet, precisely for these reasons, Detroit and Athens have become the focus of considerable international attention from both the media and cultural organizations, and they have taken these conditions of crisis as opportunities to reafirm their positions as vibrant sites of cultural production and innovation.

Building on the success of the initiative’s past IDEAS CITY festivals in New York and global conferences from São Paulo to Istanbul, this international program will culminate in IDEAS CITY New York, organized around the event 100 Ideas for the Future City.

Artists In/Of The CityA National Convening Around the Peace Table

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Artists In/Of The City

A National Convening Around the Peace Table

To accompany the current exhibition Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Maintenance Art, the Queens Museum presents Artists In/Of The City, a special convening that explores the current wave of new artist residency programs in city agencies taking place throughout the nation.

Beyond Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ almost four decade long artist residency within the NYC Department of Sanitation, NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs has recently initiated artist residencies inside three other city agencies and is working on more. Cities around the country, including Boston, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, are experimenting with their own versions of residencies within municipal agencies and departments.

Artists In/Of The City convening provides an open space to share and discuss the aspirations and experiences of artists and their city agency partners involved in these kinds of residencies in NYC and across the country. We’ve also invited those in charge of organizing these residencies to share how they initiated and structured their residencies given their local contexts. We hope that these examples will illuminate the best ways moving forward to harness artists’ unique creative and critical contributions to how urban systems work.

The Artists In/Of The City convening starts with a brief examination by Ukeles of the artworks that inspired the event from the Touch Sanitation Show, 1984. Three works originally conceived for Touch Sanitation Show have been reimagined for the Queens Museum, and we will meet in front of One Year’s Worktime II, 1984/2016, a full year of work shifts in the form of clock faces has been silkscreened over a gradient of colors representing the seasons which is installed on the Museum’s Large Wall in the Main Atrium. We will then assemble around the Peace Table, originally commissioned in 1997 by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art for Ukeles’s installation Unburning Freedom Hall. Made of layers of cobalt blue stained glass and plate glass in the shape of a halo, it will be suspended from 50 feet above the central atrium of the Queens Museum.

This setting for the convening, a literal round table, has inspired a format for the convening consisting of three concentric rings of guests. The first ring will be Presenters, artists and city officials with direct experience with residences at municipal agencies whose presentations will act as conversation starters for the convening. The second ring will be Respondents, other artists who have been asked to prepare questions to bring to the table that can deepen the conversation. The third ring will be Participants, other invited artists and the general public interested in the theme that can keep the conversation going with their own questions and comments during the convening.

Confirmed guests for the convening include:

Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Artist-in-Residence at NYC Department of Sanitation

Vito Turso, Deputy Commissioner of Public Information at NYC Department of Sanitation

Norman Steisel, Former Commissioner at NYC Department of Sanitation

Brendan Sexton, Former Commissioner at NYC Department of Sanitation

Tom Finkelpearl, Commissioner of NYC Department of Cultural Affairs

Tania Bruguera, Artist-in-Residence at NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs

Nisha Agarwal, NYC Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs

Loree Sutton, Commissioner of NYC Department of Veteran’s Services

Jules Rochielle, Artist-in-Residence at NYC Department of Veteran’s Services

Christine Tinsley, Artist-in-Residence at NYC Department of Veteran’s Services

Gladys Carrion, Commissioner of NYC Administration for Children’s Services

The Lost Collective, Artists-in-Residence at NYC Administration for Children’s Services

Marcus Young, former City Artist, City of St Paul, MN

Alan Nakagawa, Artists-in-Residence at Los Angeles Department of Transportation

Julie Burros, Chief of Arts and Culture, City of Boston

Gulgun Kayim, Chief of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, City of Minneapolis

Clark Art Institute – Terra Foundation for American Art Colloquium: “Textures of Work”

26.09.2016 – 30.09.2016 /

Terra Foundation American Art, Giverny France.

Coloquium

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Terra Foundation Giverny (Giverny, France)

The Terra Foundation for American Art and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute are pleased to announce “Textures of Work,” a jointly-organized research colloquium to be held at the TFAA properties in Giverny, September 26-30, 2016.

Bringing together a group of scholars and artists from Europe and the United States, the event will query the place of work as an activity and as an object of study within art history, as well as a current motif in the practice of contemporary artists. Although scholars of modern European and US art have long prioritized themes of labor, facture, and praxis, “work”-in its current, global, abstracted guise-remains a slippery concept. In the art world, “work” traditionally denotes an activity, a spatial designation, a place, subject, or site. Today, such a conceptual landscape has blurred. Professional roles, for example, are unprecedentedly fluid; the art industry’s “cultural producer” is potentially curator, gallerist, blogger, collector, critic, administrator, or historian all at once. The rhythms of work are by turns pulsatory and unrelieved, its textures weaving together activities that used to define different, even mutually exclusive, realms of life. The meeting is intended as a forum to reconsider the various textures of art/work-and their built-in absences and exclusions-among art historians and practitioners.

The colloquium is conceived in partnership between the Paris Center of the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Research and Academic Program of The Clark, along with two external conveners, Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley, and Eva Ehninger, Laurenz Assistenz-Professur für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Universität Basel. The pilot event in Giverny, which marks the first formal collaboration between the two institutions, will be followed by a joint colloquium at The Clark in Williamstown in 2017.

With the participation of:

Jo Applin, Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Art, University of York

Tania Bruguera, Artist

Julia Bryan-Wilson, Associate Professor, History of Art Department, University of California, Berkeley

Sebastian Egenhofer, Professor, Kunsthistorisches Institut, Universität Zürich

Eva Ehninger, Laurenz Assistenz-Professur für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Universität Basel

Ursula Frohne, Professor, Universität Münster

Trevor Paglen, Artist and Theorist

Benjamin Piekut, Associate Professor, Department of Music, Cornell University

Alla Vronskaya, Postdoctoral Student, Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Architektur, ETH Zürich

And also Veerle Thielemans, European Academic Program Director, Terra Foundation for American Art, and Christopher Heuer, Associate Director, Research and Academic Program, The Clark Art Institute

Admission to this event is by invitation only.

>  September 2016 - May 2017
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/ Fellowship – Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

September 2016 – May 2017
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Cambridge, United States.

FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM

The Radcliffe Institute Fellowship Program annually selects and supports 50 leading artists and scholars who have both exceptional promise and demonstrated accomplishments.

>  October 2016
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What is Art For?

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Mitchell Artist Lecture featuring Tania Bruguera

The University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts brings back the Mitchell Artist Lecture, a landmark public program that annually features major figures in the world of artistic collaboration. The Center’s 2016 speaker is artist and political activist Tania Bruguera. Born in Havana, Cuba, Bruguera 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. 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. Recognized as one of the 100 Leading Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine, shortlisted for the #Index100 Freedom of Expression Award 2016, Bruguera is a 2015 Herb Alpert Award winner, a Hugo Boss Prize finalist, a Yale World Fellow and is the first artist-in-residence in the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs (MOIA). In 2013 she was part of the team creating the first document on artistic freedom and cultural rights with the United Nation’s Human Rights Council. In her Mitchell Lecture, Bruguera will discuss the ways in which art can be applied to the everyday political life; focusing on the transformation of social affect into political effectiveness. Her long-term projects have been intensive interventions on the institutional structure of collective memory, education and politics. 

In her Mitchell Lecture, Bruguera will provide a multi-media overview of her artistic, scholarly and activist work. This lecture is presented in partnership with the Latin Maecenas, patron group of the Latin American art department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, with additional support from the Blaffer Art Museum.

About the Mitchell Artist Lecture

Presented by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, this free lecture series hosts groundbreaking artists who have made significant contributions to the global political landscape. Bruguera joins a list of esteemed performers who have participated in this series including dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, multimedia artist and musician Laurie Anderson, jazz musician Jason Moran and stage star Alicia Hall Moran.

About the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts

The Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts is dedicated to groundbreaking, transformative collaborations across the performing, visual, and literary arts. Based at the University of Houston, the Mitchell Center commissions and produces new works, presents public performances and exhibitions, offers curriculum and scholarships, and hosts residencies with renowned visiting artists from throughout the world. The Mitchell Center forms an alliance among five departments at UH: the School of Art, Moores School of Music, School of Theatre & Dance, Creative Writing Program, and Blaffer Art Museum. 

/ Anonymous was a Woman Award

So pleased to be among these extraordinary women, a true honor.

Ten Distinguished Artists Recognized for their Body of Work:

Announcing the 2016 Recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award

Each year, the Award recognizes women artists over 40 years of age who have made significant contributions in their fields to date, while continuing to exhibit originality and creative potential through ongoing work.

2016 Award Winners
Shiva Ahmadi
Laura Anderson Barbata
Tania Bruguera
Sonya Clark
Simone Leigh
Medrie MacPhee
Eiko Otake
Rona Pondick
Lourdes Portillo
Shinique Smith

Further information avaialble here.

Hugo Boss Award

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Hugo Boss Award

The Hugo Boss Prize honors outstanding achievement in contemporary art, celebrating the work of remarkable artists whose practices are among the most innovative and influential of our time. The biennial prize-which marks its 20th anniversary this year-sets no restrictions on age, gender, nationality, or medium. Juried by an international panel of distinguished museum directors, curators, and critics, it is administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and carries an award of $100,000. Since its inception in 1996, the Hugo Boss Prize has been awarded to Matthew Barney (1996), Douglas Gordon (1998), Marjetica Potrč (2000), Pierre Huyghe (2002), Rirkrit Tiravanija (2004), Tacita Dean (2006), Emily Jacir (2008), Hans-Peter Feldmann (2010), Danh Vo (2012), and Paul Chan (2014). Work by each artist who receives the award is presented in a solo exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The Hugo Boss Prize 2016 winner will be announced on October 20, 2016, and a solo exhibition of that artist’s work will be presented at the Guggenheim in the spring of 2017. The shortlist artists are: Tania Bruguera, Mark Leckey, Ralph Lemon, Laura Owens, Wael Shawky, and Anicka Yi.

See video on Tania’s work here.

Immigrant Movement International – Billboard

21.10.2016 – 03.12.2016 / Tue-Fri: 11:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m. / Sat: 11:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Herrengasse 13. Vienna, Austria.
Exhibition

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TOUCH THE REALITY

Curator: Ursula Maria Probst

“We have to put Duchamp’s urinal back in the restroom.” – Tania Bruguera

Pussy Riot! Theaster Gates! Ai Weiwei! The Kunstraum Niederoesterreich is devoted to art that intervenes in politics and society. What effect can art have today and what means of articulation and scopes of action does it possess to face political and socio-economic conflicts? With “Touch the Reality. Rethinking Keywords of Political Performance” the Kunstraum takes a special look at art that strives for social and political change.

“Touch the Reality” showcases concepts and practices that transfer artistic work into a socio-political domain and how they employ an aesthetic of the performative, artivism, and the public space in the process. To what extent do contemporary performance practices affect a repoliticization of art and society? How can a discussion of these issues access new territories? How can new forms of articulation evolve in a direct exchange with artistic practices? A cause of present day conflicts, according to philosopher Jacques Rancière, can be found in an ambivalent understanding of democracy, which possesses a growing potential for conflict, as current political developments illustrate.

A focus of the exhibition – realised in a cooperation between the Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Austrian Federal Chancellery, and KulturKontakt Austria and its artist-in-residence programme – is the exchange between the Cuban artists José Fidel García, Grethell Rasúa, Dania González Sanabria, and Susana Pilar, who reside in Vienna for three months, with Vienna-based artists in the development of joint projects.

>  November 2016
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Art After Democracy

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Join six senior scholars and artists for the Clark conversation, “Art After Democracy.”  

This informal gathering centers loosely on post-1989 art to consider the place of critical politics under neoliberalism’s defamiliarization and spectacularization of democracy. Scheduled near the eve of the United States presidential election, the conversation is meant to both reflect and provoke.  

Participants include:  

Tania Bruguera, artist  

Jodi Dean, Hobart & William Smith Colleges  

Anthony Gardner, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford  

Boris Groys, New York University

Christopher P. Heuer, Clark Art Institute, Research and Academic Program

Matthew Jesse Jackson, University of Chicago