Havana Science Fiction

Curated by Adolfo V. Nodal, featuring 8 Cuban Artists including Los Animistas, Fidel Ernesto, Omar & Carlos Estrada, José Emilio Fuentes, Ernesto Piña, Alain Pino, Harold Vázquez

Havana Science Fiction is a survey of eight young artists working in Havana today.

These artists, who represent a variety or points of view and backgrounds, are the new breed that is currently cutting its teeth in the international milieu and bohemian cultural atmosphere that is found in the City of Havana at the moment. Hailing from various parts of Cuba and from other countries as well, they are the true mirrors of the so-called “Generation 2000” in Cuba today. They represent a vanguard of thought and preoccupations that are strongly reflected in their frank and unvarnished artistic output. The group of young artists in this show are the new vanguard of Cuban Art, still under the radar in Cuba and seen for the first time in the USA.

Through them we can see an ample panorama of artistic tendencies and points of view that are both closely connected with the place that is Cuba-specifically Havana- and a strong relationship with intellectual life throughout the whole world. These artists are remarkably worldly and knowledgeable of trends and ideas that are global and of our time. This exhibition of individual works, which also function as a total installation, offers a gritty vision of art that is preoccupied with scientific process, cycle, endless repetition, constant change, and existential cause-effect relationships. This is raw work that is often screened through an esthetic-scientific eye and biological, religious, and ecological concerns, as well as preoccupations with human representation, sexuality, and censure. Havana Science Fiction reveals a surreal perception that filters the viewpoint of these young artists and belies the effects of rapid social evolution and changing values in Cuba at the dawn of the 21st Century.

The current art scene in Havana is as vital as ever with various active venues and a full schedule of activities, events, and critical discourse. But the artists in this show represent only a small fraction of the new Cuban art of today. Cuba is a place that generates new culture and fresh ideas just as regularly as the warm tropical waves lap against Havana’s humongous seawall “the Malecon”. What you see here are just eleven of those endless waves. But keep these artists in mind because you will be hearing from them again in the future.

Artistas participantes

LOS ANIMISTAS is a collaborative team of a visual artist, working with a professional taxidermists and a biologist, to create photography and installations that reflect major existential and ethical and ecological issues while using the Cuban Vulture (Aura Tiñosa) as the work’s primary metaphor. The installation is a stark jolt to our conscience presented as an excruciatingly up to date rendition of the common 19th Century English landscape conceit “the hunt”. The Aura Tiñosa has been considered sacred for many cultures. It also cleans the cities, and higpuays and is closely associated with death. Los Animistas document the process of finding and taxidermy of these animals, and exhibits the documentation, together with the mounted vultures, in unusual poses, and make us think, on the natural circles of life, of our ethics within society and our relation to animals. The work is presented through a scientific, bio-esthetic point of view.

FIDEL ERNESTO investigates reality itself and holds it out as a poetic metaphor of beauty with direct interventions that almost always require the complicity of the viewer. Here he uses mechanical and technical processes to quantify the dust from grinding an already crumbling rampart and to amplify otherwise undecipherable texts hidden in the gallery’s new walls. His is a vision of what’s there already whether it’s the patina of an ancient surface or sunlight tracking of the floor or making us squint into a magnifying glass to read the truth that is already written but hidden in the wall.

OMAR & CARLOS ESTRADA are a two brothers that share a special interest in science, in a Renaissance way: first of all, their works have to do with experimentation: interesting objects self-invented, that employ elements of motion and surprise, and otherwise respond in different ways to the viewer. They have recently been involved with medical aesthetics, and its similarities with cultural phenomena. They recognize the beauty of medical representation in and of itself.

JOSÉ EMILIO FUENTES works with childhood, and its traumas. The artists himself has had a very difficult childhood, when handicapped since very young. In this work the awful side of childhood deceases, violence, rudeness, goes together with the naive thoughts of children that kill, have sex, do “bad things, making the works extremely sad and powerful at the same time.

ERNESTO PIÑA has created a fictional character: an adolescent girl, who is in this period in which the teenagers develop their bodies as women, but still think as children. Ernesto places the viewer between having a paternal focus on this girl, that “flirts” with you, semi-naked, all the time, or follow the game of forbidden seductions. These psycho-erotic haikus follow a narrative thread that gives the girl character and emotional definition and provide an artist’s account of what should be a serious psychological study as practiced by a Medical doctor.

ALAIN PINO uses photography like an engineer develops a structure, each idea builds a work of art that exists as an amalgam of structural details focusing on the commercial manipulation of human beings by media and multi-national corporate interests. His current work addresses issues of migration, especially the very sad issue of the Cuban Rafters and their often unsuccessful attempts to reach American Soil and ending up in the bottom of the ocean. This is one of Cuban Society’s most difficult and enigmatic problems and Pino addresses it structurally with this photo installation that harkens back to Edward Muybridge’s scientific movement studies of men and animals. Only the Cuban subject here is drowning.

HAROLD VAZQUEZ works in the limits of the medium, whatever the medium is, offering the spectator conceptual concerns about video, photography or painting. In this case, he highlights the conception of time in video, by filming a girl standing in front of the camera, as if it were a still image and “stopping the clock” when her pose is broken. The video portraits in this exhibit shows the artist’s interest in expanding the video medium while relating it to traditional portrait painting.

Adolfo V. Nodal
Los Angeles