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12 instant portrait biennial milestone and challenge
26June
Articles

12 instant portrait biennial milestone and challenge

The cold corner, skating rink at Belascoaín and Malecon, by the Irish-American artist DukeRiley.Number 12 has a special and different significance in the history, beliefs and traditions. Twelve are the hours of the day and months of the year. The sacred history accounts of the twelve apostles who were with Christ. Likewise Greek mythology tells of famous twelve labors of Hercules that would inspire the French cartoon for children –turn then into film- The Twelve Labors of Asterix. One of the founding films of Cuban cinema of the called revolutionary period had the name of The Twelve Chairs. From the Kabbalah to numerology and certain cultural practices they use number twelve to predictions, symbolic operative, traslaticias representations and astrological measurements. In the twelve number there is undoubtedly a metahistorical projection, and sometimes a sense of completion and new starting point that makes it unique and mysterious.

"Arc of lovers" was the name this work was baptized by Kadir Lopez and Jorge Enrique Valdes entitled Opposites.Twelve have been, with this one in 2015, the biennales of Havana, since that first that we conceived in 1983 and charged presence, with Latin American and Caribbean spirit - in 1984. Twelve enactments of an event that was born from the need of anti neocolonialist affirmation of the dynamic mosaic characteristic of the art of the Americas, which later expanded to so-called "Three worlds", and over time it has been transmuted into aesthetic internationalized competition that gets closer, melts and sometimes confuses the new with the foregoing, the typical with renewal, dialectic tradition with generic breaking canons, the creative freest national or very personal type with fidelity to the "universal" paradigms coming from the dominant curatorial lines, the mandate of the market to the fallacies implied in a "contemporary" globalized sense declared as such.

Arriving at the 12th Biennial is, in fact a milestone and a challenge. Its existence in time as scope and record of stability and renewal of the artistic has been interconnected with numerous circumstances in the world, and occasionally with bloody stage of national life.

It is a practical and theoretical meeting of artists and specialists of visual art that has not always had the resources required to perform it, and its implementation has been complex, imaginative, courageous and almost epic. The peculiarity of this kind of cultural avalanche-from its genesis is rooted in the ability to respond always creative, variable, surprisingly, the expectations of the Cuban people and visitors of many nationalities. And while in some stage of its curatorial formation was marked by lectures and problem discussion that identified it with other biennials and symposia of the world, especially because it has been enlisted in a school of thought supported by the geopolitical and cultural duality defined as "center and periphery "in structural terms-which begat a biennial design with a central body and secondary- side projects, the essential need to grab other dimensions of reality and art produced jumps and developments that turn it in what it has been lately: An open, plural hybrid event as much of the current culture, transformable and unusual.

Work of Salvation project, by Duver del Diago, assaulted by children.Speaking of the XII Biennial of Havana is to approach in a polymorphous way to end a warp expanded exhibition, a constant party, proposals for EU urban culture, popular entertainment resolved with forms and artistic methods, exhibitions in museums and dialogic actions where the public becomes an active participant, launchers aimed at the transnationalised promotion, search of expressive routes including traditional and technological, ludicrous spaces and archetypes of other spiritual expect that become poetic signs. But it is also necessary to refer to a certain congregation market that serves many makers of the host country- because in Cuba there are not required domestic buyers, nor commercial entities capable of taking huge flow of creation that exists in the country- as a special occasion to allow them to gain visibility of their offers and certain essential purchases to live and continue to be expressed.Tremendous crush, by Alejandro Dario at Lennon Park in El Vedado.

In a global perspective, the last Biennial of the Greater Antilles it is offset, duplicated in itself, fragmented and also turned in several parallel fields that work with different and complementary purposes: projects in neighborhoods and social areas throughout the city that embody effective proposals "between the idea and experience"; , the Free Zone, which comprises the fortresses of Morro and La Cabana with their clutter vaults with small galleries and facilities of the transaesthetic and an armed multidisciplinary workshop; besides the Malecon assumed as amusement area, allusions to life or desires, and attractive to the general population.

We have arrived thus -in that recent celebration- to a sort of gigantic scene of the artistic and the extra artistic, concepts and fantasy, of the sacred convention and the transcended everyday, the vision focused on outside success formulas and constructive authenticity. What in other meridians was  an invention lab confined to the institutions of visual arts and cultural heritage, in our biennial has been, since the onset of participation workshops for the public, of 1986, subsequently assumed by similar events in several countries-one polyhedron lucky of sites and actions where everyone wants to be, and whose wealth of forms foreign and indigenous creator quite often fit together, the globalized name and the emerging young loaded with fresh daring, who acts with impulse of conscience, and the other one willing to the  basically sensory work or indirect tectonics of modernized hedonism. In our Biennial always coexist  and have reiterated in this No. 12, numerous contrasting parallel trends, rather distant of a Cartesian interwoven. The rigorous logic mixed with the pastiche of new generation, the harmonious paraded with the disharmonious, and the ceremony cohabited with the party, the maker of traps to the viewer's perception and who want to reveal truths through new channels were admitted as equivalent.

Another watchtower by Duver del Diago in curious coincidence with the facade of Deauville Hotel.A unicentric biennial became a polycentric biennial. All this flow of currents, styles and languages ??that claim personality traits or dissimilar cultural interests, seems to have multiplied and dispersed in the urban map, when in fact it was intended to operate on a social level, without neglecting the internal movement of aesthetic production and its renewing or dialogic projection towards prepared consumers, mostly in the United States, when we are in moments of diplomatic relations. The XII Biennial in Havana joined alternatives evolution of its predecessor, it established a broad overview of receipt for collectors and scholars, it wanted to meet the requests of many types of artists who put together the diversity of contemporary art, and it closed-a condition of the number 12- an itinerary of existence as an international art event, which from now requires changes in outlook and alteration of its conceptual logic. Without being scheduled, it has been born of its womb a sort of festival of Cuban art that not only manifests itself in Free Zone, but in a shower of personal and collective exhibitions placed everywhere, in state and private places, within institutions of culture or other spheres of society, with acceptable curatorial or marked by improvisation.

Work located in the exhibition RAM-ROM-RUM, project by Nina Menocal curated by Elvia Rosa Castro.Also this biennial marked by the number 12 has been like the Latin American Film Festival, the International Book Fair, May Pilgrimage Festival and Festival of the Iberoamerican Culture in Holguin, or the so-called Fire Festival in Santiago de Cuba, an event which entered the warp of the people, stimulated the relationship between creators and thinkers of the artistic culture of many latitudes, served the art of Cubans as a way to prove themselves and be more dynamic, allowing the exchange of feelings and reasons between the people of the visual arts sector and a multitude of sensitive people of all professions and ages-from our country and from abroad, who came to their spaces and proposals for bringing pleasure to externalize emotions, play from imaginative provocations and cultivate themselves.

Mountains with a broken corner, in the former bicycle factory of Linea and 18, Vedado

The Facade project, by the Korean artist Han Sung Pil, large-scale installation on the building of the former Diario de la Marina, Editora Abril today.

Work Civil Defense, by Ernesto Domecq, in the project of  Organic Romerillo Museum (MOR).

Surf, by Arles del Río, the popular little beach of Malecon, between Genius and Crespo streets.