Program:
Opening performance
“Songs of a Transindigenous Environmental Front” by Joulia Strauss.
Artist Talk
“De-Centering the Gaze: Artistic Strategies for a Decolonial Future”
Sara Alonso Gómez (art curator, Havana/Paris) will discuss the question of postcolonial positionalities in the context of the arts with the artists Esther Shalev-Gerz (Vilnius/Paris) and Antonio Eligio Fernández (“Tonel”) (Havana/Vancouver), especially the dimensions of alterity and critique.
Antonio Eligio Fernández (“Tonel”)
Tonel is an artist, critic, and curator who shares his time between Canada and Cuba. He has exhibited extensively since the 1970s, including at the Havana, Sao Paulo, Berlin, and Venice biennials. His latest solo exhibition Ajústate al tema [Stop Digressing] was presented earlier this year at Havana’s National Museum of Fine Arts. His articles and essays have been included in anthologies, catalogs and periodicals in Cuba and elsewhere. He was co-curator alongside Jürgen Harten of Kuba o.k.: aktuelle Kunst aus Kuba, Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (1990); and with Keith Wallace of The Spaces Between: Contemporary Art from Havana, at Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (2014) and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (2015). He worked with Concha Fontenla as co-curator of Signs: Arts, Industry and Vice Versa at Factoría Habana, Havana, Cuba (2015); and with Andreas Beitin on Art x Cuba: Contemporary Perspectives Since 1989, at the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany (2017). In 2017 he was a lecturer at the Graduate Lecture Series, San Francisco Art Institute, California. In 2019 he was awarded the “Edward Laroque Tinker Visiting Professorship” at Stanford University, California. He has been an adjunct professor at the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and is currently a part-time lecturer at the same university.
Sara Alonso Gómez
Sara Alonso Gómez is art historian, curator and researcher on contemporary art. Currently enrolled in a doctoral program at the University Paris Diderot, she carries out a research project on the notion of artistic disobedience in global times, applied to the context of Latin America. In parallel to scientific research, Alonso Gómez has a 10-year curatorial experience between Latin America, Europe and, more recently, Africa. In 2018, she founded the platform ARTICHOK, which fosters South-South artistic collaborations between Africa and the Caribbean region, and has been appointed co-curator for next Yango Biennale of Kinshasa (DRC). She is currently recipient of a one-year fellowship of the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte (DFK) in Paris for the academic year 2019-2020.
Esther Shalev-Gerz
Based in Paris, Esther Shalev-Gerz is internationally recognized for her seminal contributions to the field of art in the public realm and her consistent investigation into the construction of memory, history, the natural world, democracy and cultural identities. Her works challenge the notion and practice of portraiture and consider how its qualities may contribute to contemporary discourse about the politics of representation.
Her monuments, installations, photography, video and public sculpture are developed through active dialogue, consultation and negotiation with people whose participation provides an emphasis to their individual and collective memories, accounts, opinions and experiences which then become both represented and considered.
Constantly inquiring into transitional qualities of time and space and the correlative transformation of identities, locales and (hi)stories Esther Shalev-Gerz has produced a body of work that simultaneously records, critiques, and contributes to our understandings of the societal roles and value of artistic practice.
Esther Shalev-Gerz, born Gilinsky, was born in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her family moved to Jerusalem in 1957. She graduated from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem. She lived in New York in 1980-1981. Since 1984 she lives and works in Paris.
She has exhibited internationally in, amongst other places, San Francisco, Paris, Berlin, London, Stockholm, Vancouver, Finland, Geneva, Guangzhou and New York. In 2010 and 2012 two major retrospective exhibitions respectively displayed ten and fifteen of her installations, first in Jeu de Paume, Paris then in Musée des Beaux Arts de Lausanne. Space Between Time, her one-woman exhibition at Wasserman Projects, Detroit presented nine of her installations between April and July 2016.
She designed and realized permanent installations in public space in Tel Hai, Israel, Hamburg, Stockholm, Wanas, Geneva, Glasgow and more. She has recently inaugurated her latest permanent art work, The Shadow, 2018 in the largest plaza of campus the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
Her work can be found in major international public and private collections, more than 25 monographic publications have been published about her work.
Shalev-Gerz is represented by WASSERMAN PROJECTS, Detroit, Jill Silverman van Coenegrachts, jsvcPROJECTS/London, SPROVIERI, London and GALLERI SUSANNE OTTESEN, Copenhagen.
Joulia Strauss
Joulia Strauss (the political activist supercat shaman artist in Athens) is a member of the indigenous culture of Mari, a minority at the edge of Eastern Europe. She stands for a chord of artistic media, resonating in a deep bond with philosophy, technology, politics and environmental activism. Strauss has founded and organises Avtonomi Akadimia in the Akadimia Platonos Garden in Athens: an ongoing socio-cybernetic sculpture, a film set, and an activist initiative to transform the occidental educational system.
Her sculptures, paintings, performances, videos, were presented at the solo and group exhibitions at the Tate Modern, London, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Kyiv Biennial – Kyiv International, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Berlin Biennale 7, Athens Biennale 5–6, documenta14, Athens, Kassel, and many other venues.
She publishes the art activist magazine Krytyka Polityczna in Berlin and Athens. The recent issue, Occupy History. Decolonisation of Memory. The East German Revolution and the West German Takeover, by Thomas Oberender, has been released earlier this month.
