“Lo que me corresponde” (What is rightfully mine)
January 15 - February 20, 1999
Opening reception and performance: Friday, January 15, 1999 from 7 to 9 PM
ITURRALDE GALLERY
154 N. La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Phone (323) 937-4267 Fax (323) 93704269
e-mail: itugal@ni.net
Internationally acclaimed artist TANIA BRUGUERA explores the symbolic tensions of fear and yearning in her native Cuba iln “Lo Que Me Corresponde/What is rightfully Mine”, which opens Friday, January 15th at 7:00 PM at the Iturralde Gallery wilth a live performance.
Marking her debut U.S. solo gallery show, BRUGUERA’s presentation will feature two components: an exhibition of drawings, objects and photographs, and a performance. The exhibition will run through February 20th, 1999.
“Lo Que Me Corresponde/What is Rightfully Mine”, opens with “Destierro”, an original performance about guilt and responsibility. Premiered last summer in Havana, Cuba, the piece features the artists as the African icon nkisi nkonde, this time in the streets of Los Angeles. The artist’s dress -- composed of rusted nails, mud and foam -- will remain as part of the exhibition.
The Havana-based BRUGUERA is an interdisciplinary artist working primarly with installation, drawings and live art. Her work is a response her cultural environment, whether that is the relationship between art and power in Cuba, emigration as a phenomenon, memory, and -- more recentlry guilt and fear. In her work, she tries to fuse that which is strictly personal and intimate with the collecive and public.
After the 1997 Havana Art Biennial, at which BRUGUERA participated wilth an alternative performance, critic and curator Gerardo Mosquera wrote: “TANIA BRUGUERA recently astounded audiences with a stunning political image -- perhaps the most awe inspiring place ever made by a visual artist from the island.”
Ritual is BRUGURA’s principal process for creating art -- from the development of the idea, through the selection of materials, to the moment actualization. She works with art as a way to investigate reality, creating work in which the line between art and reality is often obfuscated, or erased.
“Lo Que Me Corresponde/What is Righfully Mine”, features drawings that serve as studies, and also consequence, of BRUGUERA’s performance. Made with such diverse materials as earth, coffee, bodily fluids, cotton, and ink on paper, the drawings map the emotional underpinnings of the artist’s social concerns.
The color photographs in the exhibition document BRUGUERA’s performances in Havana, Copenhagen (Denmark), and Caracas (Venezuela).
Also included are four objects: Besides the costume from “Destierro”, there are two flying machines in which the body must assume positions of flight -- or escape -- in order for them to be actived; one is makde of palm fronds and another of wood and paper.
Finally there is a “Estadistica”, a giant funerary flag made with rolls of human hair. During the nearby four months in took to complete this piece, the artist and her assistants collected hair from more than two thousand people. In Cuba, where African-based religions are widely practiced, it is thought that hari is one of the most effective tools in controlling other’s thoughts and actions -- making this collaboration an extraordinary communal expression of trust.
BRUGUERA has exhibited internationally, including the Sao Paolo (Brazil), Johannesburg (South Africa), and Havana Biennal, and in spaces such as the Whitechapel Art Gallery (England), Museo de Cultura Contemporania (Spain), Museo de Bellas Artes (Venezuela), and Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum (Netherlands), where she was the first Cuban artist to ever be presented. Among her upcoming projects is a group show at the Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna (Austria).
BRUGUERA was featured in “Performance: Live Art Since 1060’s” by Roselee Goldberg (Ed. Thames and Hudson, Ltd., London, England; Abrams Books, New hyork, 1998), considered by many the definitive history of performance art. She has been written about in Newweek and the Los Angeles Times, and reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Art News, Flash Art, Art Nexus and Kunstforum, among others.
A 1992 graduate of the Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana, thirty year -old BRUGUERA is currently in the United States completing a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Though she travels extensively, she is committed to living and working in Cuba.
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