THE EXHIBITION

ENTRE, directed by the artist and curator Marilyn Volkman, and the creative collective Forma Foco, made up of Lester Alvarez, Aminta D'Cárdenas, Julio Llópiz-Casal and Solveig Font, come together for the curation of a two-part exhibition series in Vienna, Austria entitled, CUBAN ART RESISTANCE. The series includes ALIBI as part of Über das Neue at Belvedere 21 Museum of Contemporary Art and How Long Have You Been Blind at ENTRE, featured in Vienna Art Week.

How Long Have You Been Blind focuses on the current context of Cuba, in particular on the events of July 11, 2021, when the Cuban people staged the largest anti-government protests recorded since the revolutionaries took power in 1959. These mass demonstrations reflected the continued and growing discontent of Cubans, specifically regarding the Cuban Communist Party’s economic mismanagement, intolerance of dissent, and harsh restrictions on civic and political freedoms. The protests were violently suppressed, resulting in 1,878 arrests. As of the opening of the exhibition 1,052 Cubans remain in jail as political prisoners, and since 2021, more than 400,000 have emigrated to other countries.

The exhibition invites reflection on how the international public has long overlooked and underestimated the Cuban reality, one where citizens lack food and other necessities, have limited access to social services, enjoy virtually no political freedom, and face severe restrictions on expression. This reality lies in stark contrast to utopian visions that idealize the revolutionary project, yet the staying power of these visions cast an impenetrable shadow over those struggling for change within the country.

How Long Have You Been Blind features the work of five Cuban artists, whose approaches find affinity with immersive technologies. This connection exists not only for the ability of Artificial intelligence and augmented reality to explore and communicate the implications of recent sociopolitical developments in Cuba, but also as a means of calling attention to the potential impact such technologies could have on various aspects of Cuban society in the future.

The artist and filmmaker Yimit Ramírez works with several methodologies to generate an augmented reality object experienced by using an immersive headset. The object, virtually present with viewers in the gallery, stands at one to one scale, bringing viewers in close proximity with one of the most symbolic and impactful moments of the July 11, 2021 protests in Cuba: a young man standing on top of an overturned police patrol vehicle raising a Cuban flag in his hands.

Filmmakers Heidi Hassan and Carlos Quintela, presenting themselves as the Hassan-Quintela collective, contribute a two-projection video installation addressing the uncontrolled mass exodus tearing apart Cuban life in recent years. The work combines traditional film with images generated by programs using artificial intelligence. 

The Cuban sound artist, conceptual musician, and experimental coder Kiko Faxas has programmed software to compose and play digital music, using the data entries of Cuban political prisoners documented on the Justicia 11J platform, which carries out monitoring work on each person detained, tried and sentenced for political reasons in Cuba. 

The artist Camila Lobón presents the original version of a work now exhibited at ALIBI, in which she visualizes a speculative future where the events of July 11 gain momentum and a crowd tears down a monumental statue of the dictator Fidel Castro Ruz, the actual construction of which is forbidden in Cuba. The piece consists of a sequence of Polaroid photos whose imagery was created using an image-generating artificial intelligence program.

How long you have been blind presents the testimony of a citizenry that, after decades of systematic disrespect of its dignity, finds itself in a state of deep loss. One of the most effective strategies of the dictatorship has been to capitalize on the narrative of the Cuban Revolution as a movement persistently striving to achieve social justice, equality and the prosperity of its people—a story which, despite maintaining its mythology in heroic proportions, has simultaneously thwarted the possibility for the Cuban people to achieve these goals, let alone secure many of their basic rights.

In such a moment, what a group of curators and artists can do, most of whom are political exiles without permission to return to their country, depends in part on the willingness of the international community to genuinely recognize Cuba, not merely as a balm for its capitalist hangover, but as a nation whose citizens deserve to be seen.

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FORMA FOCO is a non-profit organization founded by four Cuban creators, activists and cultural managers exiled in Spain. Its purpose is to make visible the creative talents of people discriminated against for political, racial, sexual, gender, economic reasons and in situations of disability, with a special interest in Cuban culture marginalized by political power, both that developed in the country itself as well as in the different diasporas around the world.

ENTRE is an independent project space located in Vienna's 7th district on Burggasse 24/4. Its programming is dedicated to fostering social and political understanding through the arts. One of ENTRE's main goals is to collaborate on socio-political content using relevant forms of artistic production that are understandable and accessible to a broad audience. Through its programming and its focus on small-scale, independently organized international exchange, ENTRE encourages people-to-people collaboration without relying on major institutions to provide Vienna with alternative forums for perspectives on contemporary art, politics, human rights and criticism.