9th Havana Biennial

JULIA P. HERZBERG

The Ninth Havana Biennial (Novena Bienal de La Habana) continues to be a cultural phenomenon because artists from the centers and the peripheries participate in global conversations on issues relevant to today’s world. More than one hundred artists from fifty-two countries responded to the theme, The Dynamics of the Urban Culture. In photography, video, installations, and painting, with a greater emphasis on the first two categories, artists explored the ever-changing complexity of the city—a locus of human, industrial, and sometimes even rural activity.i From diverse artistic perspectives, the city was examined as a site of richness, poverty, beauty, destitution, hope, and (more often than not) failure in compelling modes as a social, cultural, and political sphere to live, work, learn, train, and create; a place of recreation, aggression, accumulation, waste, dismissal, and marginalization.ii The following touches upon a few artistic propositions according to thematic subtopics. Images of the modern upbeat city engaged Laura Messing (Argentina) and Michel Najjar (Germany), among others. Messing’s Andamios II (Scaffolds II) are large photo-based paintings in which the scaffold, used for building and rebuilding, is a symbolic link to the past and future. Najjar’s photographs of New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, and Madrid attempt, through overlay and manipulation, to suggest the throbbing dynamics of urbanism at its extreme. The topological features of the metropolises are more similar than different.

La Isla del Tesoro (Treasure Island) is Polibio Díaz’s (Dominican Republic) wonderfully tongue-in-cheek video-installation-performance. The installation features a model, made of cake, in the design of an artificial island to be built on a reef in front of present-day Santo Domingo. The model, placed on top of a blue tablecloth symbolizing the Caribbean Sea, was exhibited in front of an aerial view of the city, indicating how it would have looked had the proposal not been rejected. At the opening of the Biennial, the artist cut and distributed pieces of cake to the audience, who viewed a scene from Godfather II in which Lee Strasberg as Hyman Roth gives pieces of his birthday cake, with the shape of Cuba on it, to members of Don Corleone’s family. (Polibio happened to have been an extra in the movie when it was filmed in Santo Domingo!)

In a more restrained manner, Sze Tsung Leong’s photographs address the rapid appearance of huge construction sites in China alongside the almost sudden disappearance of traditional courtyard houses. The clash between the old and the new, between tradition and modernization characterizes post-Mao life. Leong’s beautiful color photographs record urban erasure and historical absence in the face of the greatest urban expansion in the world.

A different vision of today’s China is proposed by Liu Guangyung. His video Neu01 Jinan taichi brilliantly captures the social interactions of consumers in an outdoor restaurant. The fast-moving camera creates dizzying scenes in crosscuts from an upwardly mobile young couple to bare-chested men drinking beer, to a young guitarist, and a flutist. The fast actions of a cook and the slow motions of a Tai-Chi master provide rhythmic counterpoints within the tapestry-like narrative. As the video ends, the hustle and bustle in the restaurant subsides, and the Tai- Chi master performs a timeless art in Chinese culture.

Roberto Diago (Cuba), Alejandro Ramírez (Costa Rica), Roberto Stephenson (Italy, lives in Haiti), and Yennyferth Becerra (Chile) address themes of poverty in convincing ways. Diago’s installation and video El poder de la presencia features dozens of small shacks simulating those illegally built on the margins of many cities, in this instance, Havana. The video focuses on the lack of sanitary facilities, clean running water, and “stolen” (unpaid for) electricity. Ramírez showed videos juxtaposing the ironies of under and over development in Costa Rica, a Central American country proud of its high standard of living. In Cradle Song, Brahms’s gentle lullaby is the background music for images of homeless persons in San José, a contrast that attempts to jolt the viewer out of complacency. Stephenson’s photographs reveal the variety of Haiti’s street life, its developed aspects, and the decay visible in the city’s off-sites. Becerra’s installation features a collapsible bedroom, with a bed and chairs made out of synthetic twined thread. By means of manual pulleys, the habitat can be raised or lowered, somewhat like the makeshift housing of cardboard boxes used by homeless people for protection. For Solución habitacional, the artist recycled the twined thread used in previous versions of this installation. She will continue recycling the materials after the Biennial ends, subverting the process of excess consumption, even in an artwork.

Hany El-Gowley (Egypt) and Dolores Cáceres (Argentina) recollect personal histories. El-Gowley’s installation Unveiling Cairo features a large digitized map of the city where little dots in the form of miniature photographs marked the places “changed-modified- modernized” since his grandfather’s first visit to that city in 1885. The work attempts to connect present-day urban life with memories of place passed down through family history. In contrast to El- Gowley’s personal mapping, Cáceres represents the socio-political history of her country in Dolores de Argentina on six small cast- iron panels set on the floor. Analogous to Chinese stone tablets, produced through the millennia to record history, Cáceres lists the political disruptions since her birth in 1961—military coups, disappearances of students, currency devaluations, censorship, the invasion of the Malvinas, the attack on the Israeli Embassy, and so on. The last tablet, left blank, remains to be written.

Sue Williamson (England, lives and works in South Africa) and Claudia del Fierro (Chile) gave voice to marginalized subjects. Williamson, a former journalist, showed Better Lives, films (in video format) and film-stills of Africans from countries outside South Africa who have gone to Cape Town in search of a new life. During their first interview, the artist asked the subjects about their former lives; in the second meeting, each was posed in a portrait studio where each person listened to an extract of his/her story. One of the subjects, François Bangurambona, was a deputy minister in the Hutu government when Tutsi soldiers threw a grenade into his office. After being hospitalized in Kenya, he went to Cape Town, where he operates a car repair business.

Claudia del Fierro presented Corporativo, videos based on street actions performed in a working-class neighborhood in Santiago. One of the videos shows four simultaneous sections of workers organizing merchandise in a small department store before opening time. In another, the camera zooms to vendors and office workers (played by actors) who talk about their responsibilities in the work place. Their scripts, based on extensive interviews conducted by the artist, are both humorous and informative. Had the videos been projected on the walls, as intended, the rich details of del Fierro’s performative actions would have been visually striking.

Eder Santos’s (Brazil) poetic installation Call Waiting consisted of a video (projected on the wall) and twelve birdcages on the floor. The imagery of birds flying from site to site in the city, reflected through the empty cages, is a metaphor for the freedom and containment of overcrowded, often inhospitable, cities. The hauntingly beautiful background music creates a special allure.

Eight outstanding solo exhibitions contributed significantly to the formal and thematic texture of the Biennial: Guillermo Kuitca (Argentina), Antoni Miralda (Spain), Shirin Neshat (Iran / US), Jean Novel (France), Lucy Orta (England / France), Anne and Patrick Poirier (France), Carlos Saura (Spain), Spencer Tunnick (US). These exhibitions, and those of the artists in the participating venues in the Collective Projects, comprise material for another article.

The Dynamics of the Urban Culture presents our changing world in which artists have contributed to forming visions that seek to reflect and understand it. Therein lie the enduring contributions of the Havana Biennial in which production, circulation, and exchange have a place and occupy a moment.

NOTES

1. The curators were Margarita González, Nelson Herrera Ysla, José Manuel Noceda Fernández, Ibis Hernández Abascal, Margarita Sánchez Prieto, José Fernández Portal, Hilda María Rodríguez and Antonio Zaya, guest curator.

2. Six official venues, in addition to seventeen participating ones throughout Old Havana, gave the city a pulsating rhythm unlike any other. The three-day symposium, Forum Idea, organized by Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, provided a complementary theoretical component.

This article was published as “9th Havana Biennial,” Arte ad Dia Internatioal 115 (August-September 2006): 66-71.©
All artists herein are noted in the captions.

See on HOME page: ICAA HMFA Digital Archive. Record ID: 1344023